A Review of Glowsun’s “Eternal Season”

When the average casual metal fan thinks of stoner metal, there are a few bands that are sure to pop up in their heads: Sleep, Om, and Electric Wizard, just to name a few. But there’s a relatively new band to add to that list: French psychedelic doomsters Glowsun.

Band: Glowsun
Album: Eternal Season
Genre: Stoner Metal
Label: Napalm Records
Release: September 28th, 2012

The trio has just released their second album, Eternal Season, a follow up to 2009’s The Sundering, and it surely does not disappoint. It’s fifty two minutes of droney, groovy, stoner-y goodness. Every song on this album features psychedelic ambience and crunchy grooves a-plenty, while all being unique and distinguishable.

The album’s opening track, “Death’s Face”, begins with a simple but catchy bass-line laid down by bottom-feeding rumble master Ronan Chiron. Chiron’s bass playing stands out on this album, sometimes beating out vocalist/guitarist Johan Jaccob’s axe work as the main focus of a certain segment of a song.

The album’s standout track, for me, is “Sleepwalker”. At eight minutes and forty-one seconds, it’s the albums longest song. It starts out with a distorted bass groove that just repeats under a really cool guitar melody by Johan Jaccob, which kind of sent me into a pseudo-hypnotic state while listening to it. This is one of few songs on this album that feature vocals by Jaccob, and as with the other songs, I found that the vocals were there more for added layering and depth and atmosphere, rather than actually being there for lyrical content.

Every song on the album features the kinds of effects and layering you would come to expect from any great stoner metal band, but Johan Jaccob delivers it extremely well. The album is extremely well produced, and you can distinguish all of the instruments from each other, but at the same time it still keeps the kind of rawness you’ve come to know and love from such albums as Sleep’s Dopesmoker and Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone.

Overall, given time, this album could stand up to greats such as Sleep’s Holy Mountain and Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone. It features all of the sludgy riffing, thundering bass and crunchy grooves you would come to expect from a great stoner/doom band. I highly recommend it for fans of such bands as Sleep, Electric Wizard and Church of Misery.