"Under the Influence of the Fool": Jahbulong Opens the Gates of Doom Delirium
In occult tarot, the Fool represents intoxication, delirium, and folly: a disconnection from reality and a disdain for consequences. In the classic rendition of the card, the Fool appears unaware of an oncoming pitfall — or maybe, he just doesn’t care. “Under the Influence of the Fool,” the latest single from Italian stoner/doom conjurers Jahbulong‘s upcoming album Eclectic Poison Tones, certainly aligns with the renowned card’s portent: like all great stoner doom epics, there’s a point not too long into the song where things go from trippy to brain-flattening. When it hits, you’re going off a cliff for sure, and your own tether to this world is bound to snap. Embrace the voidbound journey and stream the lengthy track now:
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In a genre where bands sometimes battle to wield the largest possible amps and the thickest tones, Jahbulong opts for a little more breathing room at times. When not in the throes of fuzz-bound madness, you could hear a pin drop between notes. In these moments of quiet contemplation that stitch together the lengthy song, ghost notes fall what seems like aeons before the full-bodied snare hit lands, and the ride bell, sparingly used, is a clarion call to arcane forces for oncoming tidal heaviness.
When that heaviness arrives, Jahbulong’s guitar tone is something of an inversion: no guitar, only fuzz, seeking out weaknesses in speakers to exploit and sizzle out from. The drumming remains hypnotic and sparse, but crucially bolsters the plodding rhythm with well-applied hammer-blows. Creamy leads work their way in afterwards with gentler dynamics, but there’s always a hint of a crackle, a threat of a flare-up into everything-set-to-eleven that keeps the listener on alert.
While Jahbulong are an instrumental stoner-doom band and that label bears its own stigma and cynical tropes, they avoid all that by approaching the genre with respect for its fundamentals — as well as a healthy dose of creativity. On “Under the Influence of the Fool,” their vision taps mystic energy to lead their captive audience away from the mundane, stumbling towards a doom-soaked haze.
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Eclectic Poison Tones releases October 30th via Go Down Records. Regarding “Under the Influence of the Fool,” the band comments:
“Under The Influence Of THE FOOL” is the opening track of our upcoming album “Eclectic Poison Tones”. The beginning riff recalls the Black Sabbath sound, then the spatial resonance expansions culminate into a distorted and thundering ending. It all started from the skeleton of this song, which was composed before the idea of the whole album was born and that’s why it represents a kind of bridge between now and our recent release, a split record with Mongoose in 2018. Beside the stoner-doom sound that we have always played, we explore new noise digressions and more elaborated musical incursions.
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