Review: Camel Of Doom ‘Splinters Of Time And Other Cosmic Fables’
A decade after Terrestrial, years filled with work on various projects like Self Hypnosis, Lychgate, and occasional contributions to doom band Esoteric, Leeds experimental space noise doomlord and multi-instrumentalist Kris Clayton, known as Camel Of Doom (a name he coined at age 12), returns with his fifth full-length album, Splinters Of Time And Other Cosmic Fables, released via Walls Of Eryx, the label he co-runs with Anamaria Miehs.
On this album, Clayton is joined by saxophonist Hugo Lee and flautist Carina Bruwer, along with a ‘cast of thousands‘ that help bring his vision to life. The result is an expansive seventy-five-minute space-rock journey that looks back to earlier highlights like Monolith and EarthHammer, while also pulling in influences from bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Swans, and Sunn O))), but still rooted firmly in the doom and sludge DNA that’s always defined this project at its core.
You never lose the weight and the low-end heaviness that’s been a constant since the earliest recordings, but it’s been given room to breathe in a way it never quite had before. The album moves easily between quiet, spacious moments and heavy, noisy soundscapes. Lyrically, Clayton draws on classic science fiction, with the influence of Isaac Asimov clearly felt throughout.
Let us delve into the six tracks of sprawling magnetism and devastating cosmic noise from the dark void, unleashed with Herculean force by all the musicians comprising the Camel Of Doom cosmic orchestra. Each track pulls you deeper into a dark galaxy, moving between a heavy, crushing sound and wide, open space, as the orchestra brings the album to an overwhelming, fighting noise.
The opening track, Solaria, is one of the album’s three longest compositions. It begins with a slow, penetrating atmosphere that evokes a lunar, desert-like desolation before erupting, and gradually shattering, like a meteor crashing into a barren planet. From there, it descends into a state of extreme sonic turbulence, allowing each instrument enough space to breathe, ensuring that the moments of peak intensity register as genuine emotional explosions rather than mere increases in volume.
Lee‘s saxophone and Bruwer‘s flute are particularly effective here. Rather than providing jazz embellishments, they function as spectral voices drifting across an empty world, while Palmer Eldritch‘s desperate drumming propels the piece toward its inevitable collapse. By the time the turbulence reaches its peak, Solaria feels less like a conventional build-up than a slow-motion disintegration, each layer giving way to the next with almost geological inevitability.
Zebra follows and emerges as the album’s most unpredictable piece. Drawing inspiration from Philip K. Dick’s Valis, it channels the novel’s hallucinatory paranoia and metaphysical unease into a relentlessly oppressive aural landscape. It’s a damnably ominous song, its visceral doom voice capable of inducing pain in both mind and body. Every instrument contributes to this direct, punishing atmosphere, pushing the tension forward without relief. You can almost feel its violent surges, a structural restlessness that continually unsettles your listening and keeps the music from ever dissolving into mere background noise.
Every instrument contributes to this direct, punishing atmosphere…
The Martian offers the album’s warmest and most contemplative moment. It leans even further into its interplanetary aesthetic, conjuring vast alien landscapes that feel mysterious rather than hostile. Here the saxophone truly earns its place within the ensemble, not as ornamentation but as an essential melodic voice, answering the guitar almost like a second vocalist. The heaviness remains, yet it is balanced by an unexpectedly meditative calm. Where Zebra embraces cosmic horror, The Martian invites genuine wonder.
By the time the title track, Splinters Of Time, arrives, it feels like the album’s centre of gravity. Without relying heavily on lyrics, it becomes the record’s most cinematic statement. At times it recalls Third Ear Band reimagined through a psychedelic haze. To my ears, it evokes travel through fractured timelines, the music repeatedly assembling itself into recognisable themes before dissolving once more into abstraction. Clayton and his cosmic orchestra transform it into the album’s most progressive composition, constantly shifting between moments of clarity and disorientation.
The penultimate track, Stigmata, descends into darker, more ritualistic territory, where the album’s doom lineage comes most clearly into focus. Slower, heavier, and increasingly oppressive, it cultivates a sense of dread that builds almost imperceptibly until it becomes overwhelming. The result is a ceremonial feast of inner insanity, as though it were documenting a psychological rite rather than merely performing one.
The sixteen-minute closer, Protector, feels like the destination toward which the entire album has been moving. Dense, immersive, and ultimately cathartic, it gathers together the musical and emotional threads introduced throughout the record into a single, overwhelming conclusion. The various instrumental voices that have populated the album converge one last time before finally dissolving, making the piece feel less like a closing track than the culmination of a carefully constructed journey.
What I keep coming back to, though, is how remarkably unified this record feels despite its considerable sprawl. It would have been easy for an album of this length, featuring so many contributing musicians, to come across as a patchwork of individual ideas stitched together without much connective tissue. Instead, it unfolds like a single sustained work, a genuine song cycle rather than a loose collection of compositions. That cohesion speaks to the clarity of Clayton‘s artistic vision right from the start.
I should also mention more than once that several tracks draw inspiration from classic works of science fiction writers very dear to Clayton, an undercurrent that enriches the album’s cosmic atmosphere without ever becoming heavy-handed or conceptually restrictive.
Label: Walls Of Eryx
Band Links: Official | Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify
Scribed by: Domenico ‘Mimmo’ Caccamo
