Ufomammut & Lento – Supernaturals Record One

June 2007 • Supernatural Cat

I've always found collaborations between full bands to be interesting. The ones I've heard rarely ever work; everyone winds up stepping on each others' toes as the instruments fight for room in the mix and songwriting styles clash. It's hard to tell if Ufomammut and Lento have defied my contrived stereotype, as they seem to go together decently enough but I'm ultimately not too impressed by the result.

I'm a very mild fan of both Ufomammut and Lento (big surprise; they're both sludge metal bands), and their collaboration produced an album that sounded more or less exactly what I thought it would sound like—the sludgy styles of each band meld pretty seamlessly, while Ufomammut's usual psych-rock accents are similar icing here. Actually, it's so seamless that if I didn't know better I'd believe it's just a normal (maybe a bit doomier) Ufomammut album (it doesn't help that Lento's sound is a bit generic). As expected, the music is incredibly dense and heavy; the guitars and bass create an impenetrable wall of sound, and when the riffing stops for some psychedelic droning-out there's still quite a bit going on.

So on the surface, there's some pretty interesting stuff to hear; but ultimately the songs themselves don't do much to keep my attention. For the most part, the bands are simply jamming out together—which is understandable; I'm sure it's tough to coordinate a collaboration with some carefully-crafted songs that make everyone happy. But as a listener, such prolonged hammering away on a single chord or riff for so long gets tiresome.

That isn't to say they don't have their moments, of course; the tense buildup of "Maestoso" is pretty darn good as an intro to "The Overload", which has a pretty amazing riff. It's just a shame that one riff is all the song ever does. In fact, when they aren't creating a wall of noise with heavy riffing, some of the sounds they create are really neat. The beginning of "Infect Two" is a great example with the tribal drumming, droning bass, atmospherics, and background vocals.

There will be plenty of people out there who will probably love this album—people who live for huge, dense heaviness; Supernaturals Record One does exactly that and it does it well. Personally, I'm ambivalent; I feel like there is a lot of potential here that wasn't fully realized and it sounds better in theory than in practice. Still, this isn't a bad album and both bands remain solid on their own, even if I'm not totally sold on their collaboration.

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