### Creeping: Order of snakes

#### 19/10/11 || gk

Creeping are a three piece from New Zealand with members who’ve spent time in Ulcerate and The House of Capricorn. Now that lineage was enough to get me interested and to check this band out and “Order of Snakes” was well worth the effort.

The band plays a kind of blackened sludge doom with the occasional nod to crust and death metal and manage to keep things interesting by writing some good songs and managing to keep things interesting. Album opener, “12 Spires” opens with a slow lumbering riff and you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was another go nowhere slow album but Creeping have a few tricks up their sleeve and the song ends on an up tempo crusty note. The title song starts off ferociously with a death metal riff before settling down into a mid tempo blackish groove with a drawn out sludgy middle section. “The Cavernous Light” reminds me of Celtic Frost in its opening few moments as a lone guitar spells out a melancholic tune before the rest of the band joins in and the song takes off into doom metal territory but like every other song on this album it doesn’t stay there for long. “Pestilential Rain” is another aggressive song with a crusty black metal approach and a memorable groove while album closer “Temple of Graves” is a massive monster of a song that ebbs and flows through moods while being almost oppressively heavy.

The band play around with sub genres right through the album. There’s black metal, doom, crust and death metal all coming together to form a cohesive whole. The band employs dissonance as a weapon to heighten the atmosphere and they use it sparingly and well. Scott Blomfield’s guitars are heavy as fuck but also cut through with a clear tone and the rumbling bass of Marco Pavlovic is clear in the mix and adds to the heaviness but it’s drummer James Wallace and his effortless shifting from sparse almost under cooked drumming on the slower parts to a furious pounding of his kit on the faster parts who gives the music a rock solid foundation.

“Order of Snakes” reminds me a fair bit of Agrimonia’s superb “Host of the Winged.” Not that the songs are in anyway similar but this crusty death black attack wrapped up in a doom metal aesthetic is playing in the same field. Creeping are a band worth checking out if you like you’re music heavy and oppressive and just a little on the slow side.

- Information
- Released: 2011
- Label: Swamps Of One Tree Hill
- Website: Creeping MySpace
- Band
- Marco Pavlovic: bass, vocals
- Scott Blomfield: guitars
- James Wallace: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. 12 Spires
- 02. Order of Snakes
- 03. The Cavernous Light
- 04. Husk
- 05. Pestilential Rain
- 06. Crawling into Hell
- 07. Temple of Graves