Tel - Lowlife - Download (2019)

Labels: Aural Music
Review by: Alex Deller

These newcomers play an odd brand of doom that’s rather on the wobbly side but also manages to be strangely compelling. Things amble along with a loose, woozy gait and a fairly lax approach to riffcraft, things seemingly held together by glowering will rather than firm structure. Guitar lines sidle off and do their own thing while cymbals clash obtrusively and the vocals veer between a moribund groan and a deathly snarl. It never truly delivers in terms of either oppressive heaviness or crushing gothic gloom and, frankly, edges toward Tuesday Night Blues Jam on occasion, but for all the criticisms you can level there’s still the sense that there might be the germ of something interesting here if they keep on down this same strange path.