I Pilot DÆMON - Come What May (2010)

In comes a relatively "out of nowhere" hit for me from 2010. I Pilot DÆMON's (I don't like this name) Come What May, creates a fairly strange blend; their tendencies towards sludge, hardcore, skramz, and even a bit of metalcore leads them to a ground that's sort of equal parts Converge, Electric Wizard, and Orchid.

The intro chugs through power chords and thick layers of fuzz, leading into sustained screams that builds to the second song, which really just comes off as a more involved version of what led them off. And from that we get lead into the bulk of the album, mostly working off a see-saw battle between their heavily stoner-influenced riffs and their quicker hardcore moments. With something like "Only At Night", we get the sludgy feel. Something taken right out Eyehategod's notebook perhaps. But at the very next moment, with "The Life Collider" we get more of a wall-of-sound, vocal led, moving into a small "shred" of a riff, abandoning the traditionally inviting sound of the sludgy "chugging".

I suppose it'd be easy to accuse them of having a lack of flow, but honestly they tend to manage the changes quite well. Vocals never change, sticking to their heightened grunts... somewhere in between a shout and a scream, and even at their most involved they seem to call back to their most chilled, and vice versa. It's quite remarkable how self-contained they are. This isn't a new band suffocating themselves with their influences; It's finding a ground that settles somewhere in-between, highlighting notes and writing their own. Like some of the new "blackgaze" artists, they are creating a new blend that recalls it's predecessors, but only in a new light. It's a new sound, not because it's experimented in timbres we haven't heard, but because it's fresh take, and a new telling of what has come before.

Streaming and a free download here