Album Review: Kongh – Dissolved in Time
Reviewed by Rick Eaglestone
When Kongh released Sole Creation back in 2013, the Swedish outfit had already spent the best part of a decade quietly building one of the most singular reputations in European heavy music, three records of crushing, glacial sludge-doom stretched from 2007’s Counting Heartbeats through Shadows Of The Shapeless to that third full-length and touring alongside the likes of Meshuggah and YOB before slipping into a silence so total that plenty of us assumed it was permanent. Founding member David Johansson decamped to Cult of Luna as their touring guitarist, the years quietly piled up, and Kongh became one of those bands you mention in the past tense. And yet here we are: Dissolved In Time, a fourth full-length arriving via Trust No One Recordings, is proof that some ideas simply refuse to stay buried.
This is a record with its eyes fixed firmly forward, and Johansson has been at pains to make that clear. Dissolved In Time is essentially his record as he writes, plays guitar, bass and electronics, sings, and mixed the thing himself though he has surrounded that vision with kindred spirits, among them drummer Christian Augustin, mastering veteran Magnus Lindberg (who also shaped Sole Creation), and backing vocals from Grave and Entombed man Jörgen Sandström. Three tracks, an eighteen-minute opener, a seven-minute hinge, and a thirteen-minute closer that between them demand the better part of forty minutes of your undivided attention. It is, by some distance, the boldest and most far-reaching record the band has yet made, and it wears that reach without a shred of apology.
Staining The Ether is where Kongh plant their flag, and at nearly nineteen minutes it is less a song than a slow act of tectonic movement. It opens in that familiar Kongh register, riffs the size of continents, dragged forward at a funereal crawl before gradually revealing just how much has changed. Electronics shimmer at the edges of the mix, layered textures bloom and recede, and Johansson’s roar, when it finally arrives, sounds weathered and enormous, a man hollering into a canyon and waiting for the echo. What is remarkable is the patience of it all; the track earns every one of its minutes, building through passages of mesmeric, cyclical riffing into crescendos that feel genuinely cathartic rather than merely loud. There is a ten-minute single edit knocking about for the impatient, but to hear it that way is to miss the point entirely. This is music built for the long haul.
Guided To The End is the record’s most concise statement, and it functions as a kind of pressure valve between the two leviathans that flank it. At a comparatively lean seven minutes it moves with something approaching urgency, the riffs tighter and more insistent, the groove locking into a grim, head-nodding lurch that recalls the band at their most immediate. If Staining The Ether is about the slow accumulation of dread, this is the moment that dread finds a shape and starts walking towards you. Johansson’s vocals here are among the most desperate on the album, and the electronic flourishes that felt decorative on the opener take on a colder, more menacing hue. It is the track most likely to lure in listeners who found the extended pieces daunting, and it manages that without diluting an ounce of the band’s essential heaviness. A brutal, focused centrepiece.
Dissolved In Time arrives to close the circle, and it may well be the finest thing Kongh have ever recorded. Thirteen minutes of controlled devastation, the title track broods where the opener built and the middle cut struck, unfurling with the grim inevitability of its own name: everything eventually eroded, everything eventually gone. Johansson leans hard into atmosphere here, letting cavernous doom passages dissolve into near-ambient stretches before hauling the whole edifice back into the red. The interplay between crushing weight and genuine beauty is masterful, and the closing minutes, all mournful melody and slow collapse, land with the force of a benediction. It is a fittingly monumental way to end a record that has staked everything on scale and conviction, and it leaves you sitting in the silence afterwards, faintly stunned. A staggering close to a fearless release.
So, was it worth the thirteen-year wait? On the evidence of Dissolved In Time, unequivocally so. This is not a band trading on former glories or gently tapping out a comeback for old times’ sake; it is Kongh sounding heavier, stranger and more purposeful than they ever have, a record that could only have been made by a man with nothing left to prove and no reason whatsoever to hurry. It asks a great deal of the listener because three tracks, forty minutes, no easy hooks to cling to, but it repays that investment many times over. Dissolved In Time is the real article: vast, patient and utterly devastating. Some silences, it turns out, are worth breaking.
A monumental return that dissolves the intervening years as though they were nothing: crushing, cavernous and quietly magnificent. Kongh have not merely come back, they have come back better.
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