FAETOOTH - Labyrinthine

Faetooth hail from Los Angeles, but “Labyrinthine” is a record that smells of wet stone, frost-covered woods, nights when your breath condenses like an omen. An album this “wintry,” born under the California sun, is already a fascinating paradox in itself, the kind that makes you suspend disbelief and let yourself be dragged into a world where beauty and terror share the same slow pulse. The trio – Ari May, Jenna Garcia and Rah Kanan – define their sound as fairy doom, but there's nothing ethereal about the way these tracks dig in: this is ritual, hypnotic doomgaze, advancing like a landslide in slow-motion.

“Iron Gate” opens the record like a rusted portal. The vocals sound like a funeral chant, while the distortion builds into a spiral that's at once sacred and threatening. It's the first hint of what will be the album's defining trait: a constant tension between enchantment and devastation.

The heart of “Labyrinthine”, though, lies in the vocal layering running through it: Faetooth's three souls converse, overlap, wrestle space from one another as if singing to exorcise something. On “White Noise” it's impossible to tell where a scream ends and a wail begins, where one voice breaks off and another picks it up.

The closer, “Meet Your Maker”, is an eight-minute sonic mausoleum where all the album's souls coexist: the heaviest doom, the shoegaze caress, chanting that borders on liturgy, and a scream that sounds like a hellish wind. It's a farewell or a beginning, depending on how willing we are to lose ourselves.