Omotai, A Ruined Oak

Omotai, I’ve missed you. It feels like I just haven’t been listening to enough truly, truly heavy, head-kicking, ear-shattering music lately, probably not for nearly a year; hell, even the metal I’ve been listening to recently has been generally on the more melodic side of the spectrum. Beyond that, I’ve been on a fairly steady diet of synth-y pop, EDM, and ’70s throwback rock lately, barring a few odd listens to PUP or Run The Jewels.

And hey, that’s all good, nothing wrong with it. But when I put on A Ruined Oak, and opener “Welcome to the Adders’ Land” starts, with the guitars feeding back eerily before thundering in like a tank roaring through a wall, I feel a door open up in my chest: ahhhhh, there we go.

The bass is so thick it feels like you could spread it on toast and eat it, frontman/guitarist Sam Waters’ vocals are throat-rending and raw (and I’m digging the hell out the call-and-response thing he gets going with guitarist Jamie Ross and drummer Danny Mee), the guitars are sharp as rusty nails being scraped down the side of an old shed, and the overall feel is just of heaviness, of weight, the same feeling I get from the first (and best, in my book) Red Fang album.

Yeah, it’s definitely been too damn long, and as A Ruined Oak rolls on, that feeling gets more and more solid in my head. Quasi-title track “Ruined Oak” is stellar, with a muscular, taut bass that sounds like bridge-suspension cables being plucked and makes me think of Barkmarket or Unsane, courtesy of bassist Melissa Lonchambon-Ryan, more of those call-and-response vocals, and intricate, melodic guitar lines weaving in and around.

I’ve long maintained, by the way, that Lonchambon-Ryan is Omotai’s secret weapon (okay, maybe not that secret, but you get my meaning); her bass is the absolute anchor for everything else, and that’s as true with this album as it’s been with the band’s previous efforts. It’s great to hear her singing/yelling/screaming more on this album, as well, particularly on the fast, furious “Blackjaw,” where she takes lead, howling over rhythms that gallop like wild horses spooked by a freak electrical storm.

She steps back into the limelight in the chorus of “Fire Is a Whore,” as well, with a seriously excellent vocal performance on a track that’s awesomely Baroness-like, sounding like it wouldn’t be out-of-place on that band’s Purple or Blue albums until it collapses into a ball of messy guitar noise at the end. Something similar happens with “Augustina,” which is as moody and somber as most of the rest of A Ruined Oak is raw and heavy; there’s a serenity, a beautiful peace to Lonchambon-Ryan’s vocals that’s a welcome break from the pummeling.

Ironically, despite the increased focus on vocals this time around, I can only understand one word out of five or so, leaving me absolutely in the dark as to what most of Oak is about — I’m told it’s actually a play on “Roanoke,” the legendary lost colony in what is now North Carolina, but I can’t say that I can make out a storyline in the songs. But hey, that’s okay with me; in a way, it makes the band’s disparate voices just like separate instruments in themselves, playing counterpoint to the thunder of the guitars and drums.

Along the way, Omotai dances between sounds, never allowing themselves to be pinned down to one specific descriptor other than the aforementioned “heavy.” There’s “Last of the Green Vial,” which melds math-y/prog-y rhythms with some nice, old-school thrash and an almost pretty melody lurking beneath the chugging, churning guitars. But then there’s “Back to the Drifting Satellite,” which is jagged and frenzied but still somehow restrained and in-control; it makes me think less of full-on metal and more of Sonic Youth, or maybe UME.

“Arms That Flood” is slow-moving throughout, remaining menacing all the way, like watching time-lapse video of a glacier slowly, methodically devouring a valley, while “A Maiden Nerve” is churning, spiraling, noisy prog-metal that buzzes and rings inside your skull long after you’ve stopped listening. Closer “Tusk Aurora” hits a similar vein, reminding me of Mastodon’s epic-sized, thinking-man’s (or, at least, fantasy-nerd’s) metal more than most of the rest of A Ruined Oak and carving its way through an epic nine minutes.

The standout here, to me — although, yeah, it is a tough call — is “A Cruel Weight, Thy Wound,” which comes smack-dab in the middle of the album. It begins quiet but soon explodes into giant-sized, bombastic life, with Waters roaring out to the world. There’s something about its slow, deliberate, complex stomp, with bits of a melody buried far, far beneath the crushing sound, that I can’t help but love.

That’s how I feel about A Ruined Oak as a whole, now that I think about it. It feels like with this album, Omotai have gotten both more expansive and more complex, but even with that added scale and complexity, there’s still a whole lot of mud and muck all around for you to dig through or dive into.

And much as I love the band’s earlier stuff, I find myself liking this a whole lot more — looking back, through 2014’s Fresh Hell and 2012’s Terrestrial Grief, all the way back to the band’s 2010 debut, Peace Through Fear, I feel like I can see an honest-to-God progression going on, with the band growing and maturing as it roars and stomps its way through the world.

As I listen to A Ruined Oak, it also occurs to me that one day soon, Omotai will shift into one of those heavy, crushing, thundering bands that other people look to as influences, as inspiration — hell, I’d bet they’re there already for some younger bands out there. One day, the band will be a real-live icon of heavy music, the kind of band people like me hold up and say, “Hey, you know what this new doom-metal band really sounds like? Omotai; you can hear that band’s influence pretty clearly on this new EP.”

Trust me on this, people; it will happen.