Salt Lake City's Subrosa is not your traditional doom-metal outfit. Well, that's not really true all of the time. The opening of "Ghosts of a Dead Empire" feels like doom by the books. Pillows of distortion suffocating your ears, the track trudges forward layering everything behind a wall of slow-moving sludge. But the track is infused with moments of something more rootsy, almost more folksy, trying to claw its way out through the layers of distortion.
That's largely because of the violins of band members Sarah Pendleton and Kim Pack, whose sound folds into the track, functioning, at times, more like guitars than violins. At other times they evoke hints of Americana and at others the swelling post-rock panic of bands like Godspeed.
The eleven minute epic is a promising glimpse from Subrosa's new album More Constant Than The Gods, out September 17 from Profound Lore Records.