2nd May 2024

Review: “Soft Eyes” by Ba’al

Welcoming new musicians into any already established band isn’t always easy and in the case of guitarist Chris Mole, he’s had to wait three years to make his mark with Sheffield Blackened Sludge fuelled Post Metal collective Ba’al. He joined them in 2021, no doubt through a connection to vocalist Joe Stamps as the pair spent time together in Child of Ash, but at that time the band were just a few months into shows around their mammoth debut album “Ellipsism“. Having bided his time, the group entered No Studio in Manchester with Joe Clayton (Conjurer, Mountain Caller, Ithaca) who recorded and mixed their third EP offering “Soft Eyes” before it was mastered by the in demand Brad Boatright (Kylesa, Vastum, Obituary) at Audiosiege. The question is, has he made is mark?

The answer to that is that it’s hard to tell as the band tread a similar path to Helve and Hundred Year Old Man in creating rich, dark and often overwhelming Post-Metal which is crushingly heavy and beautifully dynamic. There has been no radical departure from that with “Soft Eyes” but instead the steady evolution in sound, the culmination of eight years of toiling at the forge. Ba’al have created three new pieces of dark wonder that exist in the space between a blink and a tear while captivating and enthralling for the entire twenty seven minutes. The first nine and a half of those are consumed by “Ornamental Doll” which finds vocalist Joe Stamps issuing a Gollum-esq throat splitting opening verse so shrill that it threatens to tear the fabric of space and time. Shifting into something more comfortable by putting on a smoking jacket and sipping at a glass of single malt with a single cube of ice, the Gothic overtones of a clean sung verse are achingly beautiful before the descent into madness begins once more. There is an urgency to the decadent guitars as they provide melody over which the cathartic screams of a patient mental reverberate. Both epic and poetic, this opening refrain is not simply music but a twisted and contorted piece of art to be consumed as such.

After a palate cleansing moment of machine noise, the eerie and sinister sounds of “Yearn To Burn Bright” rise forth, cold and disturbing as the harsh whispers from Stamps take an icy grip of the throat. Guitars and percussion comes crashing down in a wave of sonic abrasion, shattering the atmosphere of tension as if it were a pane of glass as the band drive things forward with perpetual motion, their tank crushing all in their path. Melancholic and yet vibrant, Ba’al paint in light and shade as they push on Extreme Metal boundaries with almost ethereal moments that shimmer and shine in the darkness.

Distilling still further their prior works, “Bamber Bridge” burns as it builds slowly with gentle movement and delicate nuance, their wings gradually unfurling as the warmth of the sun breathes new life into their corpses. Sombre and sobering, the dark mood doesn’t lift despite the beauty and when the all consuming blood gargling vocals rear their ugly head a third of the way through it comes as no surprise. An extinction level event in its own right with a fleeting solo of surprising power, this piece fits the others like a glove on the hand of a serial killer. Warm and inviting yet bleak and gruelling, intense and yet beautiful, this offering is one that leaves you gazing into the middle distance, wondering exactly what you’ve just witnessed [8/10]

Track Listing