Trees

Sickness In is the third album from Portland’s most wretched, Trees. Following their similarly abject slabs of feedback-doused horror and quasi-formless dirge Lights Bane and Freed of This Flesh on Crucial Blast, the two-song full-length is a slowly rotting heap of droning, slow-motion death-doom riffs decomposing into clouds of black amplifier hum, shrieking voices and tortured screams drifting against the glacial roar of smoking amp stacks and short-circuiting hardware. This time around, the band drops some of their most leaden, majestic riffs yet into a slow-motion filth-storm. Massive, saurian doom rhythms slip way out of the confines of anything resembling a “groove,” deep into rumbling fields of charred, ritualistic chanting and Abruptum-like states of psychotic noise. 
Opener “Cover Your Mouth” crashes in on an avalanche of thrumming electricity and metallic noise; the crushing, abstract heaviness collapses in on itself while the rhythm section accentuates the rumbling black mess with thunderous blasts of anti-propulsion. Trees have always had a somewhat improvisational bent to their extreme doom-laden horror, but just when the track lies on the verge of a field of pure drone, the band unleashes titanic, earth-scorching riffage. On “Perish,” the resonant sound of throat singing introduces a new wave of howling, ambient feedback and speaker-hiss, soon transformed into another twisted, agonized pain-dirge as those tortured vocals scrape raw, pain-wracked screams that rise and fall behind the amorphous black sludge and diseased drones.