Bongripper are a sneaky favorite of mine. Admittedly not sneaky enough to hide the fact that Satan Worshipping Doom occupies a spot in my coveted Top 25, but sneaky in the way that their albums always sneak up on me. Rarely do I yearn for another Bongripper album and rarely does an album announcement elicit much more from me than a “I guess I have to check that”. It even goes so far that I never deem any of their albums anything special on first, second or even third spin. Yet, something does draw me in. Something in me demands these revisits and only with deep rooted meditation (sometimes with the aid of the very same herb that Bongripper seem to enjoy indulging in) can I find the reason why: Bongripper are good at what they do. Many bands act like they commit to minimalism, but what they really commit to is banality. Bongripper will ruminate on a riff for an extended time, sure. Their songs might at times develop glacially slowly; take closer “Empty” and how it stretches the same motivic riff for more than half of its twenty-one minutes.
Still, unlike many others, there is variation to Bongripper‘s sound. Compared to a similarly monotonous band (take Eremit, for example), active listening has rewards. Atmospheric elements populate the background of Empty. To a degree, this is admittedly sound porn. Bongripper are no stranger to feedback and I believe they spend more than a couple minutes each week looking at reverb pedals. The ambience is a classic one: feedback, fuzz and down-tuned guitars, but it slowly morphs, without drawing much attention to it. You get to know the riff, and once the riff has become so familiar that it blends into the background, you get to appreciate the way the feedback bounces off the walls — whether you’d like to or not. Oh, and did I mention there are no vocals?
I can tell that most readers, will be innately turned off reading this. “Sounds pretentious”, many of them will think, or that it sounds indulgent. I will concede the latter point — Bongripper are hella indulgent. Where a tech death band will practice to get their speed up and where grind looks for ways to become more and more unlistenable (in a pleasant way!), stoner doom bands have always been indebted to the riff. I know most metalheads struggle with the term riff, and I won´t explain it here, but it shows that many metalheads don’t actually worship riffs in the way they think. You get only riff with an album like Empty. Riff alone ain’t enough for many. If Bongripper had the legendary status that Sleep had achieved with Dopesmoker, maybe more people would give them the benefit of the doubt. Until then, Bongripper will continue sneaking up on people — and to be sneaky, you have to slow down at least a little.
