Las Cruces
Cosmic Tears

Las Cruces from Texas in The US have done a few albums over the years, and they have according to the press material been quite highly regarded but never really struck it big. They claim that their power was impossible to match, things like that. The cover over their new album Cosmic Tears looks bleak, yet adventurous, perhaps like a cause for cosmic tears. So, is it unmatched in heaviness, and is it as good as the cover suggests? Those are two questions I think about when writing this review.

Sludgy doom metal is their style, with slow heavy riffs they journey through the cosmos. The vocalist is very good, he has a very suitable style of singing for this album, and a good voice for it. It is a rather morose album; I would say that it is a bit of a dystopic adventure – and perhaps it really is. Cosmic Tears has a very appealing production with good depth and power, the backside is that the playing time is very long with the ten tracks clocking in on about an hour – I would say that one hour is too long, not just in this case but in almost any case when an album is that long.

They should have done away with a few of the tracks, the opener is one I would suggest since I find that tracks quite meaningless and not that an instant improvement is made when I skip that track and start with the title tracks that also happens to be my favourite track on the album. If they hadn’t overstayed their welcome I would have given a higher rating, but in music value for money is not how many minutes you get on the CD or whatever way you buy, it is about how it sounds and what feeling you eventually leave the album with – and this one I leave with the sense of it takes way too long to listen to it – fifty minutes would have been stretching it, but a whole hour is a bit ridiculous.

There is a greatness on this album, high quality doom metal with magical atmospheres, but there is also a sense of pointlessness. I ask myself why the long playing time, are they releasing album so rarely, and prices of physical albums is so high that they want to cram in every possible minute into it? Still, whatever the reason, the long playing time is hard to overcome as it is impossible to keep the attention for a whole hour, especially when the tempo over the whole album is so uniform. The cover suggests a long journey, and it is so that could be a check, and the heaviness is also quite strong but I don’t know if it is unmatched, perhaps it was when they debuted. Finally, I would say that this album is probably worth checking out, with today’s digital possibility it is very easy to modify the album into something greater, it is just a bit sad that the band didn’t do it themselves.

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