Richmond’s masters of slow, trudging doom metal, Cough, will release their new album, Ritual Abuse, on October 26. The album is their first for top-tier metal label Relapse Records, and will be available both on CD and a limited edition gatefold double LP. In preparation for the release of Ritual Abuse, different tracks from the album have gradually been made available over the internet. The first of these tracks, “Crooked Spine,” was posted a month ago on Cough’s Myspace, and the second, “Crippled Wizard,” premiered on The Obelisk last week. Now, a third of the album’s five epic tracks, “A Year In Suffering,” has been posted for download on Brooklyn Vegan. The track is posted in an article announcing the Brooklyn Vegan CMJ showcase at Union Pool in Brooklyn on October 23. That showcase also includes fellow Richmond-area metalheads Inter Arma, as well as Providence, Rhode Island’s The Body and Atlanta’s Royal Thunder. But that’s not really all that important to us Richmonders, is it?
No, what’s really important for us is that “A Year In Suffering,” although it is the third of Cough’s new songs to be made available online in some form, is the first that you can actually download. That’s right, you don’t have to listen to this song through your crappy laptop speakers; you can burn it to a CD and play it on your stereo, or load it onto your Ipod and blast it when you’re stuck in traffic. Best of all, at just over 12 minutes, it’s the longest song they’ve made available thus far, so there’s a lot here to sink your teeth into. There are sections in which an echoing, almost psychedelic ambience permeates the song, emphasized by reverb-drenched vocals and guitar leads. At other times, the riffs are straight-up swamp-sludge blues of the sort that a leather-jacketed biker would have given the thumbs up to in 1973. Regardless of what’s going on at any particular point in the song, though, the common thread running throughout is heaviness. Fans of Goatsnake, St. Vitus, Grief and Black Sabbath will all find plenty of reasons to enjoy “A Year In Suffering,” and one can only assume that they will feel the same way about Ritual Abuse as a whole, once it is released. Cough will be doing a full US tour in support of the album in November, and though there’s no Richmond date booked as yet (boo!), we can safely assume that they’ll be around to rock our faces off before too much longer. Until then, we have a new song to listen to, and that will have to tide us over.
Richmond’s masters of slow, trudging doom metal, Cough, will release their new album, Ritual Abuse, on October 26. The album is their first for top-tier metal label Relapse Records, and will be available both on CD and a limited edition gatefold double LP. In preparation for the release of Ritual Abuse, different tracks from the album have gradually been made available over the internet. The first of these tracks, “Crooked Spine,” was posted a month ago on Cough’s Myspace, and the second, “Crippled Wizard,” premiered on The Obelisk last week. Now, a third of the album’s five epic tracks, “A Year In Suffering,” has been posted for download on Brooklyn Vegan. The track is posted in an article announcing the Brooklyn Vegan CMJ showcase at Union Pool in Brooklyn on October 23. That showcase also includes fellow Richmond-area metalheads Inter Arma, as well as Providence, Rhode Island’s The Body and Atlanta’s Royal Thunder. But that’s not really all that important to us Richmonders, is it?
No, what’s really important for us is that “A Year In Suffering,” although it is the third of Cough’s new songs to be made available online in some form, is the first that you can actually download. That’s right, you don’t have to listen to this song through your crappy laptop speakers; you can burn it to a CD and play it on your stereo, or load it onto your Ipod and blast it when you’re stuck in traffic. Best of all, at just over 12 minutes, it’s the longest song they’ve made available thus far, so there’s a lot here to sink your teeth into. There are sections in which an echoing, almost psychedelic ambience permeates the song, emphasized by reverb-drenched vocals and guitar leads. At other times, the riffs are straight-up swamp-sludge blues of the sort that a leather-jacketed biker would have given the thumbs up to in 1973. Regardless of what’s going on at any particular point in the song, though, the common thread running throughout is heaviness. Fans of Goatsnake, St. Vitus, Grief and Black Sabbath will all find plenty of reasons to enjoy “A Year In Suffering,” and one can only assume that they will feel the same way about Ritual Abuse as a whole, once it is released. Cough will be doing a full US tour in support of the album in November, and though there’s no Richmond date booked as yet (boo!), we can safely assume that they’ll be around to rock our faces off before too much longer. Until then, we have a new song to listen to, and that will have to tide us over.
