Almost every week, Nic Huber dissects the heavy riffs of bands — new and old — in The Wednesday Sludge. This week's column covers an aptly named trio from Chicago that is agonizing as all hell.
Extreme metal helps form some of the best emotional music, as the heavy dissonance transfixes listeners in a way that allows the music to reach our inner soul and tear out whatever bad mojo we have bottled up inside.
The same can be said for all kinds of metal, most notably the kind that comes with some fuzz. Which is perhaps why Chicago's Sough is the most aptly named band ever. For a band that hails from the Windy City, Sough's vocals reflect the moan and the sorrow that comes with living in the country's murder capital.
"(We) started playing together in Chicago around March 2015," said the band's guitarist/vocalist Nate. "We recorded (the self-titled) in late Winter/spring of 2016 at IV Lab Studios in Chicago, and finally finished up mixing and mastering the record early this year."
Pictured, left to right: Nate, Andrew and Pat
Upon the first several listens, Sough's self-titled EP shows a band treading the waters of experimentation much like Deafheaven did with their blend of black metal and shoegaze. Sough is every bit a sludge band, but the band's post-metal undertone has firmly made its mark on the band as well.
The EP's opening track, "Distaste," is a melodic piece of post-metal sludge heaviness. "Weedlord," perhaps one of the heaviest tracks on the self-titled, is the band's required ode to weed and fat riffs. "Fault" is very not heavy at all, with the song being mostly an emotional spoken-word piece, relying on the guitar's beautiful melodies to progressively become as painful as the vocals.
"Release//Rapture" brings the extended play back into a fuzzy, almost desert rock-like, groove that eventually transcends into a Buzz Osborne breakdown before diving musically nose-first into a subgenre that should end in "gaze." The closer, "Disdain," also dabbles in multiple subgenres of metal's most extreme music, with Matt's vocals truly encapsulating The Body's painful belches.
"We have a few show coming up this summer in Chicago," Nate continued, "the only one that has been announced at this time is on August 22nd at Subt downstairs with Staghorn, Coastlands, and Rhone.
He said Sough is also working on new material, which will be a recorded representation of the band's new lineup, and would be hitting the road in the near future.
"We have a few shows coming up this summer in Chicago," he continued, "the only one that has been announced at this time is on August 22nd at Subt downstairs with Staghorn, Coastlands, and Rhone. Hopefully, we can do some shorter touring around the Midwest before the end of the year."
Let's hope they can, because people need to listen to this band.
