1001 Other AlbumsSOOM – Night on the Meadow (Ніч На Полонині) (2014, Ukraine)
Our next spotlight is on number 3 on The List, submitted by @sichkovskyi.
Formed in Kharkiv, Ukraine in 2013, SOOM released this, their debut studio album, the following year. While the Bandcamp description says the album is “dark surrealistic low noise about all & nothing”, elsewhere on the interwebs says the band described it as a concept album telling the tale of 3 brothers and their grandfather getting high and having bad trips in Ukraine’s section of the Carpathian Mountains.
I had already looked up translations of the lyrics before seeing mention of it being a concept album and so had assumed they were just about standard stoner rock tropes, as there’s something about a talking cat, plenty of mentions of special plants, someone hallucinating themself all the way into a desert, and meeting some sort of special plant deity. But that context plus the “Electric Molfar” character (a molfar is a magician/healer in the Ukrainian/Hutsul folk tradition) files this firmly into the realm of fairytales, which dampens the anachronistic chill a non-Ukrainian listener in the present day might get from the opening track and other scary bits. Indeed, I find this slab of blackened sludge-y stoner doom a rather excellent trip (no special plants of my own needed).
And, I should mention that I was relieved to see that SOOM is still around, as, when The List was compiled, it was already a couple years into the current invasion and they hadn’t been heard from for a few years. SOOM had officially broken up after releasing their 2nd LP, Джєбарс (2018), but they just released a new track in January, “ВСЕ, ЩО Я НАМАГАВСЯ СХОВАТИ“. Long may they doom.
Slava Ukraini.
- Bandcamp: SOOM – Ніч На Полонині | Night on the Meadow
- Discogs: SOOM – Ніч На Полонині
- Encyclopaedia Metallum: SOOM
