Band:	Dolpo
Album:	Inner Himalayas
Style:	Ritual ambient, Drone doom metal
Release date:	January 2019

01. Insurmountable Inner Obstacles
02. Prism Of The Northern Mountain
03. Kashmiri Heroin
04. Room Of Visions In Dha
05. Sikkimese Monastery
06. Self Exile

Here we have one of those situations where you can almost certainly guess what sort of music the band plays by the album title and cover alone. If you misjudge this one, we're gonna have a problem, fam.

OK, really. This thing is called Inner Himalayas, the album cover theme is in black and white, and the artwork features six smiling skulls arranged in a triangle. If you're guessing it's melodic death metal we're dealing with here, you need to reevaluate your life decisions (pardons to guesses of black metal, however). Au contraire, the Italians in Dolpo play a style of drone metal that I like to call "borderline." Borderline meaning that the music on Inner Himalayas sits right on the edge of almost not being metal at all, and firmly straddles the fence right between a droney doom metal sound and a more formless, ritualized ambient approach.

Thankfully, Dolpo merge both sides of their proverbial coin fairly well on this album, and don't merely stick to an approach of "ambient tracks over here, metal tracks over there" as do many other bands who similarly operate in both of these two hemispheres. Inner Himalayas opener "Insurmountable Inner Obstacles" establishes a formula that's essentially replicated throughout the rest of the album: a beginning in that hazy, formless ambient area, topped off with a great use of horns and percussion (samples?), a transition into the slow and heavy drone doom territory, and then an intensification toward the end as the drone doom approach slightly picks up tempo and becomes a little groovier. There are variations to this model, however, and thankfully Inner Himalayas is a great example of an album united in a single compositional theme that nonetheless displays an admirable level of diversity among its tracks.

With Inner Himalayas, Dolpo allude to several bands already out there and slightly more well known than they in both the ambient and drone doom departments. There's a bit of Dark Buddha Rising at play here, a bit of Bong, maybe even sprinkles of Arktau Eos and Alone In The Hollow Garden for good measure. But even with these parallels, Dolpo still maintain a commendable sense of their own identity with their music. After years of exploring drone and ambient forms of music both inside and outside the context of metal, I have to say that it's always nice to hear a band that knows how to craft both stimulating, pure ambient cuts while also infusing ambient influence into a metal core. And Dolpo have their bases covered with that trick for sure.

Himavat is calling.