Ottawa has a surprising amount of great bands, and has contributed mightily to the collective Canadian tinnitus in it’s generous offering of seriously heavy music. One band I’ve been enjoying for a few years, Biipiigwan, have perfected the sludgy viking side of things but injected with a very uniquely Canuck vibe, speaking to the hugeness of vast empty space, the inherent doom-feel of the frozen expanse of our ravaged, snow-covered wasteland.
Three concise songs comprise the Nibaak EP, starting off with the rolling hugeness of “Rodentia” which breaks out in all different tempos, bucking the trend of more hypnotically sleep inducing doom, feeding the ADD kid in me with mad 6/8 (I think!) breakdowns, slow, raw layers of screamed choruses and ending in a wall of shrieking guitars, hammered snares and bestial voicing that chill to the bone.
“Kingmaker” is a perfect slow burn, riding easily on a churning detuned riff for most of the song before exploding into the payoff metallic chuggity chug-chug headbang that rends the earth in a hellish crescendo. Deft pacing ends on the title track, which starts off at thrash speed, and slowly breaks down into a slower riff that steadily evolves into a harmonic picking descending melody overlaid a huge rolling beat which ends in a psychedelic, funereal iceberg of a progression that shatters ultimately in a squall of ice-cold feedback.
Nibaak is a hell of a ride in three movements. Taken together, it’s a fresh vision of lower-fi detuned sludge metal… the kind Canadian bands are ruling at right now. What lends it a unique color is a stark and enigmatic aesthetic, the effect of a huge, icy mountain of sound carved by giants. Biipiigwan have broken strange new paths in old territory with this EP. Nibaak will be widely loved by fans of psych/doom metal of originators like Sourvein and Electric Wizard while keeping in line with new generations of sludge slingers like colleagues Collider or the Montreal based The Great Sabatini.
