Brutal, filthy, lo-fi, scuzzy. Those are the first associations that come up when you press play on “Ashes of Excess“, and not one of them is meant as an insult. If you spend any time at the sludge end of the pool, you know that list is the compliment. Dirty grindcore in one spot, heavy sludge, furious hardcore in the next, then a track tender enough to catch you off guard. How does all of that hold together on one record? Well, Bongrot did it, and did it completely alone.
Bongrot are a one-man operation run by Finney out of Pinnacle, North Carolina, a very small town tucked between two mountains in the NC foothills. The nearest scene is about 20 minutes away in Winston-Salem, so keeping up with local shows means trekking out. He is fine with that arrangement. “The isolation helps me to stay focused and not worry too much about what anyone else is doing,” he said. “It helps me just stay focused and do what I feel like sounds like Bongrot and not like anyone else.”
The project started about five years ago as a loose thing. “When it first started, it was really just a copy of a lot of the typical sludge or doom bands, St. Vitus, Eyehategod, Pentagram,” Finney said.
The shift came around the “Tomb of the Witch” EP, when he noticed he was actually enjoying songwriting again after a long break from music altogether. “Once I got back into that, I kind of knew I wanted to, not necessarily make it a permanent thing, but make it more of a frequent thing.”
Solo here means solo all the way through: writing, tracking, mixing. There is no fixed method behind it.
“Green Smoke” took several years to finish, pieced together from loose bits recorded on his phone back when he had no proper way of recording anything. “Baptized in Bong Water” went the other way.
“I wrote it in 45 minutes. I just threw down a d-beat drum track and just went from there and built the song around it,” he said. These days the routine starts with a clean bass track laid down purely to keep time, what he calls the shit track, and the recording proper follows from there: drums, guitar, bass, then the rest.
The lyrical territory on “Ashes of Excess” is unusually specific: drug addiction, religious indoctrination, childhood trauma, depression, and the realities of life in rural Appalachia.
For Finney those five are not separate files. “A lot of people have that same story, where it could be the drug addiction led into the other stuff, the religion led into the other stuff, the childhood trauma led into the other stuff,” he said. He writes from his own experience with all of it. “I can only speak from the small town rural American Appalachia point of view, because that’s all I’ve ever known.”
“To Dine with Rats” is where the religious pressure sits closest to the surface. Southern Baptist and primitive Baptist congregations dominate where he grew up, and the song is not aimed at the people in the pews.
“It’s more against the preacher, the pastor, the father, whatever you want to call it, because nine times out of ten either they will condemn everyone for what they do when the preacher is turning right around and doing the exact same thing, or worse,” Finney said. His own upbringing went further than the usual small town church story. “We grew up in a semi cult church, where if you dress different, if you look different, if you ask questions in the slightest bit, you were wrong, and I guess somewhat possessed. But if you stole money or something like that, then it wasn’t that big a deal, which is something that actually happened. Several higher up people in my church got arrested for embezzlement, and then it became the flock of the church’s problem to keep money on their books, which to me is the most hypocritical thing ever.”
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Asked which song says the most about him, he picks “Carolina Death Cult“. “It’s pretty much about just being a loner, and like, you can be in a room full of people and still be completely alone, but also can turn that around and be the life of the party, and be the person that all eyes are on,” he said. “It’s more or less just telling people, unless you’re trying to see crazy shit, stay away, because crazy shit seems to follow wherever I go. I know that sounds braggy, and I don’t mean it that way. Crazy shit is not always good. Crazy shit can just be crazy shit sometimes.”
The reference points around Bongrot, His Hero Is Gone, Eyehategod, Dopethrone, each handed over something specific. Eyehategod gave the swing.
“I just think a lot of southern US bands have that sort of country swing to it,” Finney said. His vocal style, closer to a black metal shriek than a hardcore shout or a guttural death metal growl, traces back to Dopethrone, Weedeater and a bit of Buzzov•en. His Hero Is Gone live in the guitar. “That more rough, almost black metal guitar tone that is just super dry. I love that tone, always have.” He also credits those crust bands with an attitude he reckons a lot of doom bands never pick up, but the sludge scene runs on. And the record that fits none of this and is always in rotation anyway: “36 Chambers” by Wu-Tang Clan.
Winston-Salem has a decent little doom scene coming up, with We Follow the Earth and Mean Green as the two big names right now, plus a deathcore scene Finney was big in when he was younger.
But the shout out he most wants in print goes to a person, not a band: Nick Dawson, his friend since seventh grade and bandmate in his very first group. “We taught each other how to play guitar,” Finney said. They have not played together in a long time, but they have been working simultaneously ever since, Nick’s stuff fast and deathcore, Bongrot slow and low.
The cover, a green mushroom with a single eye dripping into the band name, is Finney’s own work.
He is an artist by trade in his day job and draws for the band constantly. The idea was to sidestep the super serious metal look. “I feel like sometimes it can get a bit cheesy, even though I love it,” he said. The mushroom is a bit goofy on purpose, but also, in his words, very spiritual and very tough in its own way. The eye is open to reading: he has thought about it in a government sense, a god sense, a music sense. “That’s one great thing I feel about music and art, is it means something different to everyone. So whatever you get from it is the right answer.”
A new EP is already on the way, and it is a natural continuation rather than a volume two. One riff left over from “Ashes of Excess” made it on, the rest is newly written, and the whole thing slows down further. Where “Ashes” runs mostly mid tempo with the occasional breakdown, the new stuff is super low tempo with the occasional faster part. Beyond that, the plan is more EPs building towards an album, finding members, full time or part time, to start playing shows, and touring: the parts of the US he has not seen yet, then anywhere in the world that would have him and be into what Bongrot is all about.
“Ashes of Excess” is streaming over at Bandcamp. Give this one a proper listen, especially if you like your sludge slow, low and unwashed. “Hopefully it keeps on moving,” Finney said. “We have bigger things coming in the future.”
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