This record has been out for awhile, but we never stocked it until now. Available on black vinyl, this is one to pick up if you dug that new album that came out on Profound Lore earlier last year...
From Forgotten Tombs is a vinyl-only collection of re-mastered odds and ends culled from the ten year presence of this Portland, OR based sludge metal band. The band includes past and present members of esteemed Pacific Northwest black metal outfits like The Howling Wind, L'Acephale and Wolves In The Throne Room, but Aldebaran are pure doom. The Lp features the tracks off the Pleasures Of War 7", their side of the split CD with Ohio's Rue, and a previously unreleased cover of Pentagram's The Ghoul", all recorded between 2004-2006, showcasing this monstrous outfit's awesome blackened boogie and glacial deathcrawl.
The two tracks off the Pleasures Of War 7" are primo Sabbathian sludge jolted with a sickening, blackened vibe, a more diseased and rotting take on the swampy evil boogie of Weedeater and Eyehategod, huge bloozy riffs splattered in feedback and sinister discordance, the drummer weaving through the tarpit crush with jagged, complex rhythms that get pretty twisted. Like a lot of Aldebaran's stuff, there's a Lovecraftian influence that runs through the songs with sampled voices and nods to gibbering cosmic horror that appear in the art and lyrics.
Same goes for the four songs from the Rue split; here's my old write-up for the disc from back in 2004: Following Rue, the lumbering black sludge behemoth Aldebaran makes it's appearance, their first track is the awesomely titled "They Bend The Trees And Crush The Cities" rises up with an H.P. Lovecraft derived sample that I can't place, and crush forth with a slow motion tar-spattered boogie that moves in thick gooey strides. The other three tracks blend together the apocalyptic imagery with songs titled "Tower Of Famine", "Aldebaran Red", and "The Obscene", and mix in some spacey chorus-soaked guitar effects into the creeping sludge, which, coupled with Mike's distinctive screeching witch-howl (how in the fuck did I never make this connection before?) makes this sound a lot like YOB stripped down to it's barbaric blackened core and playing a more primitive droning variant on their psychedelic doom sound. Definitely a band that fans of YOB and Buried At Sea and Bongzilla need to hear.
And then there's the Pentagram cover, a solid choice in tuneage to pay homage to; Aldebaran drag "The Ghoul" down into a sunless subterranean hole way beyond the sub-basement, that massive Sabbathoid riffage drenched in gluey heaviness, the song dropped down into some rib-rattling tuning and transformed into a leaden graveyard crawl that could just as easily have been one of Aldebaran's own songs.