Ahab - The Boats Of The Glen Carrig - Review

Living in a maritime country creates a deep bond with the sea. It can be seen and smelled and heard. It can be felt. As a kid I would spend my holidays with a fish gun. It almost always resulted in me just swimming around and observing the beauty underneath. I still get excited about it and I remember diving in late August and seeing around me numerous big red jellyfishes, big enough to hold in my child lap. And I would get anxious and scared and I would swim around them and observe the pulsating bell and the tiny little sphere-like bulbs that had the poison in them. These are a few of my memories and part of my story.

These memories were a starting point for creating a relationship with the music of Ahab. Their craft is of the sea. It is of the unexplained, mysterious and awe inspiring depths. With each album they tell a maritime story, based on a book. “The Boats Of The Glen Carrig” is a horror novel by William Hope Hodgson and was the inspiration for Ahab’s album of the same name.

How often can we say that the experience of an album resembles that of a story? Yet, here it is, for us to be exposed to it. Ahab continue further down, or further south, on the road they have taken many a years back. Richer, fuller, more diverse and with a wider range of emotions, this album balances the extreme with the mellow, the weight of the sea with the lightness of the ocean breeze.

At times it swallows the listener, “The Weedmen”, and other times it pushes him/her back on the surface, “Red Foam”. “The isle” hits like the menacing waves and “To Mourn Job” puts the salty grave stone on the listener’s heart.

It is the easiest album to listen to, compared to their previous releases, but it is still heavy and slow and unforgiving. The main difference is the coloring. I say coloring because, well, because I see colors. Let’s call them emotions. From black to white and from red to yellow, “Boats...” is indeed a book to be listened to.

It is obvious the Ahab worked a lot on the instrumentation and the editing and the layering, making it a dynamic experience. But, this being a rather new and unknown territory for them, the experience isn’t that precise. It feels that the album didn’t develop that much grit. It doesn’t haunt me. It is a beautiful experience that doesn’t call me back. If they continue on this path, they will own it and they will create a doom, not funeral, but doom album to be remembered. It is their ocean and they invite us to it. Allow yourself to sink into the depths of this enjoyable desperation.