### This Weary Hour: No hand to comfort you

#### 11/09/09 || Smalley

Man, talk about yer emo-sounding album/band name combos, eh? But seriously, this young Irish group doesn’t have much to do with that dreaded bane-of-all-things-metal style, instead fitting much more snuggly into the sludge/stoner/drone metal category. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help their cause much, since these guys are pretty much the boring kind of sludge/stoner/drone; while this type of metal can be done properly (Electric Wizard, man!), it can very easily be rendered dull, and TWH does exactly that, through their repetitive, one-dimensional kind of songwriting, as well as their basic sound problems.

“Algor mortis” is the opening track, and it does have good drumming (as does every other track on this EP), but the murky, lifeless guitarwork, and overly slow pace still make it a boring listen. “Frozen” starts off similarly, but when the annoyingly guttural vocals from Eamonn O’ Neil kick in (no joke, he kinda reminds me of Dani Filth!), they just throw another monkey wrench into the works. O’ Neil does use clean vocals some on this record, and they are okay, but they’re often mixed in right alongside his harsh vox, so that both styles are unnecessarily competing with each other, making for a very irritating contrast. Anyway, the rhythm guitar does give a nice bit of heaviness to “Frozen”, but the actual riffs are pretty boring, and destroy most of the potential enjoyment I could’ve wrangled out of the track.

“Harvest” has some nice, melodic guitarwork at the beginning, but the stupid, strangled-sounding vocals ruin this track as well, and while “The lure of prominence” is a short instrumental that’s actually kind of interesting at first (at least compared to the rest of the stuff here), it ultimately doesn’t go much of anywhere. “The wordsmith” is a snoozer, with the largest amount of those annoying harsh vox of any track on the EP – do not want! There is a soft section in its middle, with some spacey guitarwork going on, but that still doesn’t hold my interest much.

I really don’t foresee these guys dethroning Primordial as the awesomest Irish metal band anytime soon. Though, I have to admit, I dug the muffled, hollow sound that they gave the drums (it really is a unique sound) and the drummer is quite skilled at his instrument, but the good drumming isn’t enough to lift up the middling songs, and make them worth sitting through. Like the score pic says, I did sort of like some of “No hand to comfort you”, and it isn’t complete shit, but I’m not gonna tell you to go search out this little EP just because it doesn’t happen to be awful; your life will probably fare just fine without it.

- Information
- Released: 2009
- Label: self-released
- Website: This Weary Hour MySpace
- Band
- Eamonn O’ Neill: vocals
- Sean Murphy: guitar
- Decy Synnott: guitar
- Ben Kelleher: bass
- Damian Jarzabek: drums

- Tracklist
- 01. Algor Mortis
- 02. Frozen
- 03. Harvest
- 04. The Lure of Prominence
- 05. The Wordsmith