If you asked me to make a list of the most adventurous (and strangest sounding) doom metal bands around right now, both Aarni and Persistence In Mourning would be somewhere at the top of it. The two bands make a good pairing on this new split album that just came out from Witch Sermon, which features five new songs from each outfit, joined by Alessandro Falca's colorful, arcane album art. Both Persistence In Mourning and Aarni infuse their crawling metal with strange occult-tinged imagery and concepts, but they diverge from there into very different directions of slo-mo weirdness.
The first half of the disc features the unique and utterly strange prog-doom of Finland's Aarni, and it's as mystical and convoluted as their previous offerings. The band lurches from heavy, lop-sided doom to bizarre psychedelic soundscapes, where utterly stoned flute solos and gorgeous dark guitar meanders through hazy twilight shadows and field recordings of wild birds and honking geese. Aarni have always been prone to venturing into borderline "pop" sounds within their lysergic doom, and that appears here with the catchy "Land Beyond The Night", with it's part classic doom metal crunch, part gloomy alt rock jangle. But then they follow that bit of quirky doom-pop with the growling deformed sludge of "Lemminkainens Temple", an acid-damaged hallucination that sounds like Saint Vitus playing on broken instruments as they're slowly descending into a severe psilocybin-fueled breakdown. Their last song "Goetia" is the creepiest, the songs of wolves leading into strange verbal invocations and another warped heavy doom-metal freak-out, their heaviest riff dropping in among deep death metal style growls and eerie melodic guitar interludes, someone muttering in Finnish while weird cackling voices emerge in the background, and a church organ plays wildly over a crushing Frost-like dirge and the drummer's wild mix of tribal rhythms and break-beats.
A much uglier sound rears its head when Persistence In Mourning takes over. Creeping through their experimental doom metal shot through with moments of haunted beauty, this is oppressive, isolated heaviness that's based in raw, creeping funereal doom influenced by the likes of Skepticism and Thergothon, but from there Persistence In Mourning drapes it's morose crawling sludge with all kinds of squealing electronic noises and effects. The turgid riffs and minimal drums slowly drift through clouds of amp-squeal and Theremin-like effects, a thick layer of hiss and speaker-crackle covering the music, while the harsh, blackened shrieks drift up from below. The noise elements and simple, pounding drums give this a cold industrial feel, an interesting contrast with the fuzz-soaked primitive doom riffs and eerie chorus-drenched guitar melodies that float over the grungy doom, but then it'll drop off into passages of squelchy prog synth ooze and waves of phased distortion, or stretches of howling feedback and manipulated noise that transform the sound into a pure power electronic-style assault. One of the more interesting PiM tracks featured here is "Purification", whose haunting bass and piano melody, hellish vocals and putrid noise come together like a weird cross between a blackened power electronics assault and an Angelo Badalamenti piece. Just like all of PiM's other recordings, this is recommended stuff if you're a fan of both extreme funeral doom in the Skepticism vein and the electronic sludge mayhem of Bastard Noise.