antiMusic.com: Pilgrim - II: Void Worship Review

Pilgrim - II: Void Worship
by Matt Hensch

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Talk about dropping the ball. I thought Pilgrim did a fine job throughout "Misery Wizard" with its slow, melancholic lurches and Reverend Bizarre-esque textures-big songs and big riffs. Two years and some change passed between "Misery Wizard" and "II: Void Worship," though it sounds like they wrote and released the latter within a space of five days. These songs bore me to tears. Plodding, monotonous doom numbers crammed alongside FOUR useless instrumental tunes stack up to almost forty-five minutes of these American doomsters asleep at the wheel. Quite sad given that "Misery Wizard" actually had a fair number of memorable hooks and choruses, whereas "II: Void Worship" peers down into the quality vacuum and adores the vacancy of its languid numbers. It worships the void, all right.

The main issue here isn't an identity crisis but a depersonalization. These bruising, dejected riffs aren't much different from Pilgrim's guitar work on "Misery Wizard," save for the fact that they are all completely uninteresting and wishy-washy. Riff after riff is manufactured to act like a fourth-rate doom chop: slow, open-ended, and gradual, yet completely without substance. There's no other way to describe the riffing other than it's all composed of basic, unhurried notes and beating-said sequences into the ground for minutes on end, going nowhere. Pilgrim is a group that drives itself on the power of the riff; no hooking guitar work means "II: Void Worship" becomes this stale, lumbering product circling around the ghost of what it was capable of. The drumming is standard for this kind of thing: simple, sluggish, as lethargic as the sonic setting; about what journeymen of doom would expect.

The only anomaly is "The Paladin," a rocker a bit more up-tempo yet still ineffective for the reasons mentioned above. Jon Rossi's forlorn vocals augment the musical spine substantially, but the whole thing is pretty much derailed by the utter absence of worthwhile riffs. "II: Void Worship" is no hydra, and without its head there's not a whole lot it can do but flail around and twitch. But then there are these instrumental tracks, which are no different from the three 'real' anthems other than their lack of vocals. What's the point of adding in "Arcane Sanctum" or "Dwarven March"? Why not just settle for an EP of genuine material instead of this filler? Pilgrim just falls apart here, sounding disinterested and directionless. It's demoralizing, really, because they mostly stick to the same formula upon which "Misery Wizard" was based; the ingredients are here, the execution not so much. The only thing missing from "II: Void Worship" is the only thing that matters: quality.

Pilgrim - II: Void Worship
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