Album Review: Tribal Gaze - The Nine Choirs
Reviewed by Sam Jones
When I noticed Tribal Gaze were preparing to launch their first full length record, The Nine Choirs, I badly looked to grab this album, considering my positive reaction to last year’s debut EP, Endless Voyage. Formed only in 2020 out of Texas, United States, the band got on with their career extremely quickly with that aforementioned EP that quickly jettisoned their name to observable heights. This was soon followed by a Split this year where they featured alongside bands like Peeling Flesh, Sanity Slip, Amnesia Garden etc. However, that now brings Tribal Gaze over to their first significant phase of their time as a band: The Nine Choirs. Having been taken on by Maggot Stomp, one of the few record labels where I will check out any new addition no matter what, here we have Tribal Gaze’s first album. I was ecstatic to see where the band would take me next.
Once the music gets going, we’re subjected to a huge swathe of tone. It’s not merely the guitar work alone that harnesses such a tone but the entire album seems to propagate this sound. Whether we’re listening to the riffs, drums or the bass lines, the tone this record manages to exude is absolutely monstrous. Tribal Gaze carry over the work they committed on their debut EP and seemingly crank it up to 11 by instilling their sound with a presence that is utterly impossible to turn away from. As a result, residual instrumentation feels heightened and is forever at the forefront of what you experience of this album. The slower aspects of their songwriting feel weaponised as chords ringing out against the album’s walls feel deadly; even when the band offer you moments of reprieve it’s never entirely without the looming strength of this band too far behind.
I loved what they did with the vocals here. Instead of seeing to it that the vocals were on the same wavelength and tone as the instrumentation is, the vocals feel ever so slightly removed from the album’s overall tone. Let’s make no mistake, the vocal delivery is mighty, gruff and has all the bile you’d want to experience out of it. Yet, the vocals come across with a more natural, organic feel to them; they sound like they’ve taken just a drop down from the rest of the album’s uniformed sound. As a result, your ears won’t be audibly blind to them; the vocals stand out because they’ve been deliberately fashioned to do so. As per the performance itself, it isn’t anything new we haven’t heard before but because of how it’s been tweaked in the mix, it stands out with virile power.
It’s striking, for a debut full length release, the lengths the band will go to for a varied pacing throughout their record. If anything, it’s most appreciable through the drums we get. The band’s sound is never achieved through a one-note sound or a singular approach to songwriting. Many riffs herein are ripping, faster and seek to tear you apart, but then you have segments where the songwriting is blockier, steadier and allows their audience to headbang accordingly in step. Where the drums are concerned, they rarely break out into prolonged periods of blast beats; you get displays of them here and there, but they’ll soon revert back to a more intricate style or something all the more straightforward. The drums never settle into one position for too long, and it isn’t long before their input influences the course at which their sound continues to morph. A three minute track here has just as much sonic diversity as other bands have pulled off with triple the timespan they work with.
Continuing on where we were discussing the record’s concrete density and tone, credit has to be handed to the mix whereby we can receive that massive wave of guitar tone that’s amplified by the album’s mix on the whole but also to how the band have ensured the totality of their sound doesn’t drown out the smaller niceties that ultimately make this record a well-rounded experience. In spite of the gruelling bite this album possesses, it knows when to hold itself back; the bass can disappear entirely to give you undiluted bass drums alongside a steadily strummed riff; the band know when to allow wildly flailing guitar screeches ring out all the while they’re enacting blast beats to create a ruthless soundscape. The combination of sonic medleys the band are looking to throw at you is great to see; this may be just their first album but they’re committing admirable effort to make it stand out, it’s no wonder they were picked up by Maggot Stomp. Tribal Gaze evidently understand how to bring the might but are intelligent enough not to let that power become lost in translation from them to us.
In conclusion, Tribal Gaze’s The Nine Choirs is an album that absolutely justifies its addition to the Maggot Stomp roster. For a band that only released their first EP last year (which I reviewed of my own accord), it’s been a joy to see these guys go from strength to strength with genuine improvement found within their sound and songwriting. That EP, Endless Voyage, may have been our introduction, but The Nine Choirs feels like a legitimate baptism; the first true demonstration of what Tribal Gaze have to offer us. With a runtime that isn’t too long at all, the band gave us nine tracks that do much to keep us engaged and a presence that is impossible to turn away from. The moment this album starts, they hook you in under their shoulder and do not let go; it isn’t a punishing soundscape but one that clearly holds you captive and wishing for more. Maggot Stomp made a sublime decision taking in Tribal Gaze under their name. This is an album people will return to again and again. Deeply enjoyable.
