Gloomy Waters Run Deep
Somergloom: Night Three
SUMAC goes all caps at Crystal Ballroom on Saturday, 9 August 2025.
Morne, Chepang, MOTHS, Cowardice, A Monolithic Dome, and Chainlacing open the seven-stack bill at Somergloom V.
How many photographers can dance on the head of a pin?
Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix
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Hump Nights
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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️ Hump Nights 〰️
Hump Nights
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Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix
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Hump Nights 〰️ Ace the Quiz, Win the Tix 〰️
Who knows what darkness lurks in the heart of the ‘Gloom?
Somergloom celebrated its Vth year, ushering into the world the melancholy music of sixteen bands, on two stages, over three days.
A fourstack bill opened the festival at Deep Cuts in Medford, followed by two nights of sorcery and sorrow at Crystal Ballroom in Somerville.
The Gloomdogs were $4. The ‘Gansett tallboys about $5 or so. And the altar of mourning dedicated to the recently deceased Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne? Priceless.
Chainlacing
Chainlacing
Lauren Crosser stepped out from behind the drum kit of her other band (Slow Quit) to strap on a guitar as the fronter for Chainlacing. The five-piece crafts medium tempo, synth-laden, post punk, gaze-gloom. There was an approachable pop sensibility at the heart of Saturday’s set that reeled you in with an icy drone.
A Monolithic Dome
A Monolithic Dome
There’s crossover membership between Body Void and A Monolithic Dome, right? Or am I just imagining things?
The three-piece AMD delivered elemental, gut-punching doom that skewed toward the artier and more abstract end of black metal. Lots of negative space within the compositions, which would have been just quiet and empty regions of non-sound, except for the whistling amp that they couldn’t quite get silenced during soundcheck. I think I preferred the whistling amp partially filling the negative spaces because my nature abhors vacuum cleaners.
Also, the bassist was rocking a motherfucking SIX-string bass.
Cowardice
Cowardice
A real slow, doomy grind with Cowardice. Shades of TFAGH in terms of tempo. The five-piece sprawled itself across the stage, stabbing, scraping, and scratching the music out of their guitars, through the amps, and into your ears. Their most recent full-length LP Atavist runs about 90-minutes long, including 17-minute closer “Hall of Mages.” There are full-lengths, and then there are full-lengths. That record is full-length.
MOTHS
MOTHS
Puerto Rico’s MOTHS completed a triumphant US tour at Somergloom V, performing their latest album Septem in full, front to back. It’s not the first time that the band has been through the Bay State. Hear bassist Weslie Negrón tell the tale in a recent interview with Hump Day News.
The five-piece rocked through the album, which makes musical hay out of the seven deadly sins, one sin at a time. What’s your favorite sin? I’ve always been a “pride” man, myself.
Chepang
Chepang
The NYC-based “immigrindcore” outfit Chepang is not your average NYC grindcore band, delivering all their lyrics in Nepalese. Not that you could hear the lyrics specifically, shouted through the chaos of guitars, drumming, electronics, and slamdancing, but I trust that they were there.
Speaking of slamdancing, the vocalist didn’t even wait for the set to start to jump into the pit. Which should’ve been the start of some sweaty moshing. But it took the set a while to warm up in that department, which I credit entirely to the excess of photographers ogling for a shot of “rock n roll punkers,” or whatever, letting it rip.
“A watched pot never boils,” so they say. This pot did, but a few less photographers in the mix and it would’ve boiled a lot sooner.
Morne
Morne
Morne performed as a four-piece. The veteran doomers don’t gig that often these days, so their set was a treat for the gloomy completists out there. If you like what you heard, or want to hear what you didn’t, the band has a steady breadcrumb trail of studio recordings, dating back to their formation in the Aughts, for you to dig through.
SUMAC
SUMAC
Aaron Turner (ISIS, Old Man Gloom) is the local Masshole lynchpin of the three-piece, post-metal, all caps supergroup SUMAC, along with Russian Circles bassist Brian Cook and Baptists drummer Nick Yacyshyn.
Straight out of the gate, the band removed the faux-stone gargoyle-capped columns that had stood stage right and left throughout the three-day festival. Perhaps they wanted a more serious tone that one that might be set by stage props that were, to paraphrase Spinal Tap, “in danger of being trod upon by a dwarf”?
Expressionistic. Deconstructed. Post-metal. Free metal. Try to find the pithy descriptor that captures the SUMAC project. The house mix right before their set, for sure picked by the band, was free jazz. So that’s the class of music and headspace that SUMAC wants you to be in to experience their sound live.
Was free metal as “free” as free jazz? It’s uncertain how much improvisation was in play during Saturday’s headlining set. Improvised or not, the connective tissue of the compositions was much more liberated than your average metal mauler. The trio still uses the textures of metals – distorted guitars, thumping bass, cannonade percussion – so there’s a bit of a bait & switch involved for the casual listener.
Hence, a pit-full of slamdancing hopefuls kept waiting for the doom grind to kick in so they could commence hurling their bodies at one another. But the sound cue never quite came. If SUMAC makes music that cheerleads pit histrionics, they weren’t playing it that night.
Instead, we received a set of cerebral post metal that will delight connoisseurs of the genre while leaving some with simpler tastes scratching their head.
No worries. It’s SUMAC! All caps SUMAC!
Photo Gallery
SUMAC goes all caps at Crystal Ballroom.