Modder – The Great Liberation Through Hearing (Recommendation)

There is something on the horizon. Some green otherworldly entity armed with a Hellebarde and with lightning behind its back comes stomping towards you, leveling anything in its tracks. This behemoth is called The Great Liberation Through Hearing and can’t wait fill your ears and heads with riffs for days.

Three years after their EP Mudslinger, Modder return with their second album on Consouling Sounds / Lay Bare Recordings. Inspired by “the Bardo Thodol” (The Tibetan Book of the Dead), this album really slams you out of life just to bring you back again and repeat it over and over.

This album squashes you in many ways. Sludge and Doom may be the main ingredients, but you can’t limit Modder to them. The songs shift shapes more than once, in each and every song of the album. Bang your head, dream, frown and doze, everything goes. Just check out the opener “Belly Ache” or “Gazing Into Domination” and you’ll know what I mean.

What really stand out to me, beside the stylistic variety is the production. Recorded at Dunk!-Studios and mastered by Brad Boatright, The Great Liberation Through Hearing is a sonic juggernaut. Although the metallic chaos may reign around the listener, once the Post-Metal sets in, everything is clear and invites to dive deep into the atmosphere. One can only image what songs like the raging “Feral Summer” or the Sludgefest closer “These Snakes” will do combined with a frantic audience.

Modder deliver a fantastic record with The great liberation through hearing. It will surely be hard to stop the behemoth from the album-cover from carving a deep valley into every venue Modder will enter. The only option here is to join forces and enjoy the destruction.