When a band comes through your town on a tour that they’ve labelled “The Incessant Drone of Misery Tour,” it’s a fairly safe bet that they’re not going to be singing tunes about sunshine and lollipops. And sure enough, when UK funeral doom five-piece Esoteric took to the stage at The Garrison on Sunday night, there was a distinct lack of good-time party rock anthems. Rather, true to their name, the Birmingham band was instead offering up something a tad more, well, esoteric.
Doomy, trippy, and most definitely heavy as hell, Esoteric offer up an interesting blend of crushingly heavy riffage and somewhat proggy psych elements in their sound, all of it delivered at a funereal pace. The band is currently touring behind their latest album A Pyrrhic Existence, their seventh, which came out back in 2019 via Season of Mist. It’s the kind of album that opens with a 27 minute track and just keeps going from there for 90 plus minutes of epic doom. After 30 years as a band, Esoteric have definitely mastered the art of the slow burn.
While Esoteric may not make the kind of music you’d throw on to get the dance floor moving, it definitely sets a mood and I will admit that there were more than a few times during their set that I found myself smiling and slowly nodding my head in approval to the music. So, I guess this is proof that (the incessant drone of) misery really does love company.