Band:	Seer
Album:	Vol. 6
Style:	Sludge metal
Release date:	February 2019

01. Oath Of Exile
02. Iron Worth Striking
03. Seven Stars, Seven Stones
04. Frost Tulpa
05. As The Light Fades
06. Prior Forms

I always feel weird going into an album whose title contains a number to order it by. I feel like I'm just waltzing in uninvited halfway through a movie and I patiently have to go back and start over. Thankfully this is Seer's first album where it spans an entire volume, with the previous ones being only half as long.

So Seer's albums follow a narrative that spans each of their records. If you're like me, you'd probably feel inclined to listen to everything in order. But you're probably just now hearing of Seer, 2019 is almost or already over and you're cramming as many unlistened 2019 as you can, so who has time to listen to a few extra records just to catch up. One can simply enjoy Vol. 6 while completely disregarding the narrative, which is what I'm doing right now. The only way that I do take the narrative into account is seeing whether Vol. 6 feels like a cohesive album that could tell a story. And that it does.

Vol. 6 is a mixed bag, not in terms of quality, mind you, but in terms of how many sounds of doom it can approach in its runtime, which probably helps with the narrative feeling of the record, with it constantly changing moods, paces and sounds to fit whatever part of the story it's telling, so much so that it's been able to communicate that without any need for following the lyrics. I often enjoy music that is able to approach and shift between multiple related sounds, but it's also quite a challenge to do it without feeling either disjointed or like one sound is performed significantly better than another.

At its core, Vol. 6 feels like a pretty light sludge album. Light here is a relative term, Vol. 6 is not light by any means, but if you know enough sludge, you know how dark and heavy it can get, so Seer is more of the early Baroness and Jupiterian type of sludge rather than the Lord Mantis or Primitive Man type. It does get quite heavy at times, but more often than not it dives instead into melodic doom, mostly in the clean vocals, which might just be the some of the best doom vocals I heard lately. Combine that with the bass-heavy and lush sludgy/stoner guitars and a very dynamic and almost progressive approach to songwriting and you have an album that feels grandiose in scope, dynamic in sounds and memorable in melody.

Well, maybe if I find the time, I'll follow the narrative more closely, but as it is, Vol. 6 can stand well enough on its feet with just the music that builds the story.