Weekly album: Turbid North - Orogeny

Turbid North - Orogeny

2011 / Death metal, Sludge

1. Wolves

2. Rift

3. Bereavement

4. The Hunter

5. Stormblast

6. Between the Glacier and the Sea

7. Kodiak Pt.1

8. Kodiak Pt.2

9. Orogeny

10. Floating the Ionosphere

btcarey: Turbid North’s second album, “Orogeny”, is an album that will always have a place on my playlist. The root of my undying affection for the album stems from its relationship with my home, Alaska. Being such a small place (with regards to population, not area, Alaska is the largest state in the US by far, UP YOURS TEXAS!!), Alaska has a minuscule metal scene, primarily comprised of sub-par, screamo/metalcore bands (if you want an example check out “36 Crazyfists”). For most of my life I just assumed that Alaska’s metal scene was hopeless, that is, until the day I saw Turbid North. The band, originating from the small Alaskan town “North Pole” (I’m not even kidding, that’s actually a place), gave me a new hope for the scene and an Alaskan metal band I could be proud of.

Turbid North is the bastard child of Pink Floyd and Mastodon, raised by The Black Dahlia Murder. Orogeny is a complete blend of genres. In just one song, the music could include an Iron Maiden riff, transition to crushing doom, and finish off with a psychedelic outro. One drawback of all the stylistic transitions is that they are not always well executed, taking the listener a bit off guard and making the music sometimes hard to follow. But overall the music is well blended, giving you a diverse experience song by song.

Even though Turbid North isn’t made up of extraordinarily technical musicians they do a great job of coming up with dynamic, quality songs. One of my favorite examples of their musicianship is the instrumental “Floating the Ionosphere”. The song especially showcases the guitarist’s ability to write some awesome blues based solos and provides a perfect conclusion for the album.

So if you’re interested in something a little bit different and off-the-beaten-path check this album out.

Favorite Song: Between the Glacier and the Sea

Orostider: Turbid North was something I had never heard of before this, but I went to look at their bandcamp tags. 'Death metal' and 'doom metal' don't really tell anything about this album, because their vibe and sound go from Black Dahlia Murder to Baroness and onwards to a sort of fusion of the former two. That's an unusual but admirable range of elements.

The first songs fall into the Black Dahlia Murder-ish category and I had to actually check if the vocalist could be the same in both bands. Two different persons but almost exactly the same sort of high pitch voice. My comparison could be seen as mocking Turbid North, but I'm quite impressed by their material. What made the impression, was the shift from BDM to Baroness style sludge. The transition could have been smoother, but the unexpected change of the main element, just when you've gotten half-way through the album, leaves you sort of thoughtless so it's a bit hard to notice the roughness of the transition. 

In my opinion, the sludge infused songs beat the hell out of the rest of the songs, but all in all 'Orogeny' is a solid album, although not an excellent one. There were parts I really disliked, like the slow chugging in 'Hunter', but on the other hand, I really liked 'Between the Glacier and the Sea' and the sludgy two part song 'Kodiak.' 

How can an album with such a drastic change in sound halfway the album still sound so intact, even if there are, in my opinion, some integrity damaging elements?

Favourite song: 'Between the Glacier and the Sea.' 

tp5170: Now to be frank it’s quite rare for me to listen to death metal on my spare time and there are together only a handful of bands in the genre that I actively listen to. Orogeny didn’t quite make it to my list of worthwhile DM bands; not because I’d consider them bad, but because there has to something really special for offer to make me interested in the genre in general and unfortunately I didn’t find that special something on Turbid North. 

It sounds pretty silly, but I’d go as far as to say that I kind of liked everything on the album that wasn’t specifically death metal, because it seemed like there were plenty of other interesting elements to be found on the album, but as for the DM component, to me it simply felt like your average death metal racket and that pretty much killed the album for me. However, I found the not so traditional DM parts somewhat interesting and overall I think that the album seemed to keep getting better and more diverse as it progressed.

I can only imagine that if you actually are into the DM this album might be quite the jewel, because despite not personally liking the major DM aspect of it, it still sounded really polished and well balanced between the traditional DM, melodic- and doom(?) elements, - an interesting mix you don’t see that often and I’ll have to admit that on this album it worked surprisingly well.

Favourite song: 'Floating the Ionosphere'

Kattroll: The album begins with quite a technical part and I was afraid that the album would only consist of this kind of stuff. Even though the album's sound changes, the album, lasting for over an hour in its entirety, is quite pummeling the whole time. This sort of album maybe shouldn't be this long. 

What I liked the most, was the album's cover art. Freezing cold wintry landscape and horse corpse pecking crows are exactly the sort of stuff that do it for me. The colours are a bit too light in my opinion, but the coloured pencil -like print is really pretty. Pictures like this could be featured in the popular adult colouring books! 

Even though the album was okay, I probably won't come back to it. It was pretty exciting to hear Alaskan band's material, and sometimes the album reminded me of the Finnish Deathchain, which isn't a bad thing at all.