Hold it, wait … I can hear you think, ‘I thought Inner Demons only did 3″ CDRs,’ and while you aren’t completely wrong, it’s been a while since they also do the 5″ / normal-sized ones. So here we have another full album, over an hour of some great sounds to listen to. The Grey Men are a collective of experimental musicians from Sydney, Australia, with stringed instruments forming the base of some ultimately heavy drone doom with a side serving of experimentalism.
“Slowly played distorted guitars and feedback with modular synthesizers, tape loops and obscure samples to achieve sounds both harsh and transcendent” is mentioned on the Bandcamp page, and exactly that is what I thought of when listening for the first time. Honestly! I’ve seen Sun O))) a few times, and even when The Grey Men reminded me of them, there was something different. Listening and registering, I somehow came up with Sunn O))) getting a lot of their extra layers from valve harmonics and volume, The Grey Men aren’t afraid to incorporate other instruments to generate those extra layers.
Sure, I admit, at high volume is where noise has the most impact, but this is actually also very admirable on a lower level. Not too low, though. The tracks are between 7 and 13 minutes and there are 6 of them on this album. Most drone doom, except for “Void” which has vocals as if it’s a cross-over with black or death metal. A few tracks are very strictly slow guitar in sync with what you’ll expect from a band inspired by Sunn O))) and others have more of a droney trajectory or buildup or are more noisy in nature. And while I’m thinking and listening yet again to come up with a favorite track for the podcast, I can’t… There are two or three so different that I just can’t make that choice.
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