There used to be a time when I felt like I was more or less on top of what was happening in the Icelandic music scene. Now look, I’m not delusional – I don’t live there, so there’s only so much I can do to stay up to speed, but we do have the internet, and it felt like during the the first half of the 2010s the number of new releases was small enough that you could have a sense of what was going on. Today? Not so much. In fact I was commiserating with my friend Gestur over at Reykjavik’s Lucky Records when we were out there a few weeks back and he said the same thing. There’s so much new music coming out that even the record store can’t keep tabs on everything, and many artists don’t even bother to offer their releases to the shops, instead selling their output themselves via Bandcamp and social media.
Which is a sort of me setting up an excuse for why I’d never heard of Morpholith until recently. The five-piece doom ensemble from Iceland put out two records in 2020 that completely passed me by. Hell, I missed Dystopian Distributions of Mass Produced Narcotics for a year as well. Fortunately the cover caught my eye this year (at, of course, Lucky Records…), so I grabbed a copy to bring back stateside. And damn I’m glad I did.
I should probably listen to more doom than I do, because most of what comes across my turntable is excellent – the trance-inducing riffs and percussion representing an evolution from the first Black Sabbath record and “Kashmir” into something of continent-like proportions, the kind of weight the human mind can’t even fathom. Morpholith take it a step further with their vocals – tracks like “Narcofactory” alternate between the low, deep rumble of doom and the screech of black metal, all the while pummeling you with black bludgeoning bolts of bass. On “Hellscaper” they add a third element, a soaring voice, not in a NWOBHM way, but something that sounds like it’s off in the distance a bit, a normal man’s voice as it tries to reach out to the heavens, desperate to be heard and understood in an oppressive world that is trying to drag him down and grind him into ash. It all comes together on the final side-spanning track “Exoportal”, 16 minutes of sludge, plaintive vocals despairing, the early parts of the song impossibly slow, the weight straining to break free and accelerate under gravity.
Dystopian Distributions of Mass Produced Narcotics is available online for streaming, and you can grab the vinyl directly from Morpholith’s Bandcamp page HERE.