No Room For The Weak, a four-song EP from the Italian trio Father Murphy, is an ironic title. On an album whose pace feels like a dead pulse, the weakness is glaring.
Father Murphy boasts a brand of doom-and-gloom rock that’s powered by sparse electric guitars, swirling feedback and droning vocals.
Sudden stops and starts to the band’s songs make for a weird, rhythmic tension. It’s the kind of stuff you’d find in an old cult classic horror movie. With its seemingly religious name and sound, it’s a successful gimmick.
But this is a hard genre for the casual listener to get into, and Father Murphy doesn’t do them any favors.
The nine-minute, patience-eroding “We Now Pray With Two Hands We Now Pray With True Anger,” contains only the same guitar chord with barely distinguishable chant-like vocals.
The chanting mutates to wailing and back, but the instrumentation never changes to take the song anywhere, leaving you wondering what the point of the ride was.
And while Father Murphy’s sophomore album had songs filled with a sense of purpose and drive, that feeling is gone here.
Perhaps the only song worth listening to is its cover of Leonard Cohen’s “There Is A War,” in which the group’s reverb and echoes make the song much more sinister-sounding than the original’s acoustic plucking and lighthearted chorus could.
An EP is a chance for a band to use the minimum amount of time to pack the maximum punch to a listener. Unfortunately, it seems Father Murphy decided to use this format as a vessel for its own self-indulgence, a roster of filler tracks that will deter all but the most dedicated of their fans.
