Overmars

Born Again

Wonder Woman's gone doom metal | Crucial Blast

To release a heavy metal album consisting of a single 40-minute song is a none-too-subtle attempt to give one’s band a rarefied air, yet the instrumental lineage of Overmars’ Born Again is simple enough for acolytes of droning doom metal to discern: the cascading, unrelenting bar chords à la Neurosis’ Through Silver in Blood poured along with the esoteric, arty, dark expansiveness of the Southern Lord roster into the same audacious mold as “Go Spread Your Wings,” the 23-minute sprawling epic closing Godflesh’s otherwise über-distilled 1994 record Selfless. Crucial Blast might as well send a photocopy of the thesaurus entries for crush and pummel in lieu of a press release.

Just as a movie with a serviceable, familiar plot can be elevated into something extraordinary by a single outstanding performance, however, so too is this French doom/dirge/drone ensemble propelled into singular territory whenever they allow bassist Marion to assume vocal duties from her two Scott Kelly-aping co-vocalists. The most obvious touchstone here is Jarboe from Swans—a similarly adventurous vocalist who employs a keen sense of ambience and dissonance within already unsettling contexts—but even this great compliment fails to fully encapsulate her genius. Imagine the menacing, self-assured purr of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon circa Goo and the roar of Kat from Agoraphobic Nosebleed blended with a black metal-tinged take on Björk, then channeled through a vocalist unafraid to get as freaky as any deep-cut on those acid-soaked early Frank Zappa and Alice Cooper records, and you’ll be somewhere in Marion’s artistic neighborhood. It is a tour de force that will leave listeners wondering why she is so relatively underutilized.

Serious fans of avant-garde metal have heard much of what Overmars have to offer umpteen times since the early ’90s, albeit usually in slightly shorter and far less interesting form. The moments when they transcend, however, are as jaw-dropping as they are seminal.

—Shawn Macomber

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