Ahab
The Coral Tombs
Napalm Records
With their vast, monolithic sound and lyrics derived from classic nautical tales, Germany’s Ahab are a band drawn towards the epic and their latest album, The Coral Tombs, is no exception. With down-tuned guitars and echoing percussion, the band create a feeling of something so enormous and awe-inspiring it can barely be comprehended. The seven tracks comprising The Coral Tombs (of which, only one clocks in under six-and-a-half minutes) are an anchor weighing heavily upon the listener, and with the force of an ocean bearing down on a sunken vessel. Sailing through both calm and turbulent waters, Ahab take the listener on a cinematic journey, and one that’s rich in deep ecological symbolism. With some of the heaviest riffs known to man, tracks such as ‘The Sea As A Desert’ are very tsunami-inducing, yet Ahab aren’t all choppy water; shimmering guitars contrast with the distorted and the lighter sections provide some welcome relief from the band’s oppressive darkness. You’d expect Ahab’s tight lyrical focus and crushingly-heavy brand of funeral doom to be a one-way ticket to a watery grave, yet The Coral Tombs finds them charting unexplored territory and proves that, as they approach their twentieth anniversary, there’s plenty of life in the old (salty) dog.
Review by Peter Dennis