Taurus – Life (2012)

Running the birthday of one of our staff members, the Psychedelic Doom duo of Taurus has chosen July 5th to release their very weird and not quite cohesive debut release. “Life” presents us with two tracks that spawn 35 minutes into a downward spiral trip into total chaotic weirdness. Just picture two people getting high out of their mind and banging at some instruments trying to play Doom Metal, once you have that idea in your head, make it a bit worse and you have “Life”.

We are huge fans of experimental music and there are quite a few bands that are pushing the boundaries of Doom Metal (one of our favorite styles of Metal), but Taurus seems to set that back like 10 years with their childish and amateurish release. We are quite frankly shocked that they managed to tour with Agalloch, maybe they have some super awesome live show, because musically we can’t really hear why.

Opening with “Life Part I”, we are left wondering for a bit if our computer froze and this promo is just stuck…. but no, this is actually how the song goes. When the band finally gets unstuck, there are some good riffs here and there resembling Ufomammut and even some of the Ides of Gemini stuff, but nothing cohesive enough to hold a track together. The band’s music is very sparse at times and while they play with the space they create very nicely, it still feels a bit too random for our taste.

“Life Part II” features a wider array of deranged ramblings that actually create a creepy and quite chaotic atmosphere, but the band gets lost again in their own sound trying to do too much not being effective enough at it. There are some fine drone/doom sections, but they are just too split-up in the track that they fail to create a cohesive flow to it, maybe this is what they are shooting for, but this is surely not something we enjoy.

Overall, unless you are pretty stoned or deaf, we don’t think “Life” is a good release to own. While there are a few moments here and there and the band’s experimental approach has potential, we think they need to focus more on actually writing songs that adding more weird shit to them. Buy at your own risk if you want something totally weird, trippy, and not quite cohesive.

Release: July 5th, 2012

Genre: Psychedelic/Drone Doom / Experimental

Country: USA