Going Home by Latter Day Exploits | Review

Do you feel like cranking up some doom metal for the next thirty-nine minutes? And you're aware that means only four songs? Latter Day Exploits' recent album, Going Home, runs that deep, and every song moves like a massive storm.

Latter Day Exploits is a Christian experimental metal project out of Roseburg, Oregon, and across three prior releases the artist has been stirring industrial, black, death, and doom metal into what their own bio cheerfully calls "a petri dish." Going Home is where the experiment finally comes to a full fruition.

"Through Sleep" opens on dissonant hums and clangs beneath a twanging guitar before the whole thing gives way to a monumental wave of doom metal fuzz. It's heavy, heavy. The track carries enormous weight and still moves between droning verses and rapid-fire blast beats without a seam showing. The words put you inside a sleep paralysis episode, a narrator wandering a wilderness of fitful dreaming while something breathes against the window glass. He calls out to Jesus from inside the terror, and the music does what the words do, pinning you in place and dropping the floor out.

"Anvil of Humanity" works in funeral doom territory while pulling on the grunge that any artist from western Oregon grows up breathing. The result brings catchy breakdowns and grooves into the album's most experimental passages. It’s a strange trick and a satisfying one. Lyrically, it's a broadside against partisan politics as a ship of fools. Herod and Judas are located inside the narrator before either gets pointed at anyone else, which is a more uncomfortable move than the standard protest song makes, and a more Christian one.

The title track is the centerpiece and the widest swing. It’s ten minutes of fluctuation between post-hardcore elements, somber guitar sweeps, thudding waves of distortion, and guitar twangs at arena-rock scale. The song jangles between odd syncopations, but the drive never sags. There is a marching quality to the whole thing, the rhythm of unsettling waves and tides, of how a storm moves from chaos to calm and back before subsiding into something serene while the landscape it crossed is transformed. The words do the same work. It is the prodigal son set to doom metal, staged as an argument between two voices. One tells the speaker he is swine, unworthy of mercy. The other answers that a father who loves him is already running out to meet him. The serenity at the end arrives because grace outlasts the accusation. It’s an impressive track all around.

"Autumnal Fires" closes the record, a twelve-minute cover of the Mourning Beloveth song. Classic doom, boisterous and big. Patrick Bruin's clean vocals arrive with a more sorrowful, pleading tone the album has withheld until now. The cover shows where much of this album's tone and structure comes from, though it stays less experimental than the three originals around it. I also find that ending on a lament this heavy keeps the record honest.

In the small world of faith-grounded extreme metal, Latter Day Exploits sits near Dawnbreaker and Within Thy Wounds, though the kinship is one of conviction more than sound. Where Dawnbreaker builds liturgy out of tremolo riffing and Vials of Wrath heads for the autumn woods, Latter Day Exploits works at a bench, welding industrial noise onto a death-doom mass.

The credits open with a single line: "My Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." That sign-off matters, because these four songs move through sleep paralysis, spiritual darkness, power and disillusionment, and out the far side toward redemption. Latter Day Exploits has made a record about being changed by what you survive. On top of that, this is the most impressive and compelling release the artist has put out so far. With Going Home, we see Latter Day Exploits stepping into real mastery, pulling from all across the extreme music spectrum.