Floor – Oblation

April 25, 2014 • Season of Mist

Not much has changed for Floor since their breakup ten years ago, and you could say that's both a good thing and a bad thing. On one hand, their signature melodic-doom style is still as crushing and majestic as it's ever been and they're still quite fun to listen to. On the other hand, there's nothing new going on at all here—nothing that we haven't heard on other Floor or Torche albums.

In fact it wouldn't be inappropriate to think of Oblation as just "the next Torche album". You have a lot of the faster-tempo almost-stoner-rock-like songs that wouldn't be out of place on Harmonicraft combined with the low grinding chug-a-thon of Floor's older material. They are still making liberal use of their ultra-detuned guitars for those sweet distorted bass drops or whatever they are, so that's good to hear.

But none of the songs really stand out to me as being particularly interesting or exceptionally well-written or catchy or memorable. The riffs mostly seem like a kind of jumbled mess of notes that technically go together but aren't organized in any meaningful way. The album just kind of flies by with nothing to say as it goes.

I'm not saying it's bad; I like listening to it on some level and don't find myself wanting to shut it off or anything like that. It's just that it's probably best relegated to background music because there's not really a lot worth paying attention to. Stick with their well-established classic albums (Meanderthal and Floor). But, if you get a chance to check them out live (as I did last year), that is definitely worth it.