Band:	71TONMAN
Album:	War Is Peace // Peace Is Slavery
Style:	Doom metal, Sludge metal
Release date:	July 2021

01. War Is Peace
02. Peace Is Slavery
03. Ignorance Is Strength

War Is Peace // Peace Is Slavery is brought to you by 71TONMAN, the 6 Million Dollar Man's less illustrious cousin.

I hadn't heard of 71TONMAN until a couple of weeks ago, when Transcending Obscurity Records reached out to suggest their new EP after my review of Bearer Of Many Names by Eremit from the same label. I feel like there's probably only enough room in the world for one Eremit, but I appreciated the suggestion and gave it a shot. This record, as already mentioned, is an EP, running for 23 minutes, so this might be a reasonably-sized review from me for once, although it's not the first release from the Polish band, who already have two full-length records to their name.

War Is Peace // Peace Is Slavery is comprised of three tracks, two of which form the title of the album. "War Is Peace" does show some overlap with Eremit, in that they're both extreme doom bands at heart. However, the approaches are different; there's none of Eremit's exhausting repetition and glacial pace, with "War Is Peace" moving along at a slow yet sustainable grind. Whilst Eremit's sludgy compositions almost enter funeral doom territory, 71TONMAN actually have a substantial old-school death metal component to their sound, from the gargled growls to the riff chords and drum patterns. The song doesn't feature the explosive aggression of death metal, instead opting to remain slow, doomy and grim throughout.

With a sound lurking somewhere within the intersection of death, doom and sludge, you're going to need a good production job to give it the necessary power, and War Is Peace // Peace Is Slavery does a great job bringing force to the instruments whilst still having enough roughness on the edges to make those growls and riffs feel suitably putrid. Additionally, when the song takes a brief clean guitar break towards the end, the atmosphere isn't undermined; in what is the strongest segment on the song, and perhaps the EP, simple yet effective clean guitar motifs are overlaid above a plodding doom crawl, with the outcome sounding both eerie and intimidating. Some of that atmosphere is carried over onto "Peace Is Slavery", which has a satisfying build before slipping into a powerful death/doom march. With double bass rolls, brief bursts of blasts and a heightened place for the drums in the mix, this second track ups the ante during its first half, before then taking a leaf from the Eremit playbook and locking into a single dirge riff for the remaining minutes of the song.

With just "War Is Peace" and "Peace Is Slavery", War Is Peace // Peace Is Slavery would be a short yet effective sludgy death/doom EP. However, there's a song missing from the album title, and it's one that honestly could've been missing from the album without particularly detracting from it. Comprised solely of eerie ambient noise and occasional spoken word samples for 9 minutes, "Ignorance Is Strength" is a bit of an exercise in excess; a couple of minutes of this noise to finish off the album would actually work quite nicely, but taking up over a third of the EP with this noise is frankly unnecessary. I haven't listened to the band's previous albums to know whether this is a regular feature of their sound, but if it is, I would recommend that they perhaps use it somewhat more sparingly, and also potentially integrate it between the metal songs more, as in this instance it de-incentivises listeners from listening through the entire EP; I feel far more inclined to listen to the first two songs and then move on something else than subsequently battle through 10 minutes of noise. There's cases of similar approaches working in the past, such as Agalloch's Ashes Against The Grain, but in that instance, "The Grain" was the epitaph after nearly an hour of music; with less than a quarter-hour of music preceding "Ignorance Is Strength", it just doesn't elicit the same response.