Album Review: Taurus – Life

Taurus
Life
Independent

What I want from my Metal is something that scares me. Something that makes me feel uneasy. Taurus sounds like mental illness in the very best way you can think of mental illness. The guitars are slow, sludgy and haunting, layered with a razor sharp distortion. The vocals seem like they’re being screamed through the other side of a black hole. The drumming is varied. It’s primarily slow with schizophrenic, erratic outbursts. The low end is thick black and viscous. It’s an abstraction of Sludge Metal as if Taurus is the sound of Dali’s “Persistence Of Memory.” Taurus is cold, and bleak akin to being caught naked in a blizzard. There is no hope. No chance of survival. Your life is slowly slipping away and you ARE going to die. Life at times is monotonous but just at the point of irritation, it changes, something is added or removed. The album has this incredible bleak, dark atmospheric presence that really sticks with you the entire time. It feels like there’s something standing just behind you, but when you turn around, it’s gone. This isn’t something that is easily accessible. It takes a few listens to sink in. It’s very unorthodox in the truest sense of the word. The compositions rage against convention and are truly successful in their defiance. If you took Celtic Frost’s “Trptych: Totengott” and married it with Yob’s truly strangest moments, you would get Taurus’s debut, Life. This is a challenging listen. Once I got my head around it, I found the album as enlightening as gazing into the vastness of space. I recommend this. 

Dave Meredith

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