Visions Of Metal In 2019

It was an early day in the winter of 1999 when I awoke from a horrific vision of immense despair. I saw a desolate land, littered with waste and overcrowded with wandering souls in torment. Skeletons danced basking in the moonlight, and the light did not reach the wandering souls. Many were stuck in a swamp polluted with syringes. Others frantically dug through a graveyard searching for a cadaver but finding only a few rotting limbs. Some sought to create a fire but could not create a single spark. A large crowd gathered around the statue of a hammer but could not get it to move. And I saw a well, the waters of which were poisoned by a river of sewage from a foreign land. And above the well it was written THE WELL OF INSPIRATION.

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Paramaecium – Exhumed of the Earth (1993)

In addition to its notoriously contradictive definitional nature, doom metal remains something of an enigma in terms of its enduring popularity. Whether or not one chooses to view it as a distinctive subgenre, style or even technique, doom metal must bear one of the most in-proportionate quotas within metal music when it comes to quantity over quality.  If attempting to depict doom metal from the perspective of enduring releases, the list of canonical works would become surprisingly short.  It seems plausible that part of the explanation to this sad state is embedded in the very characteristics of the style.  Doom bands have generally prioritized development of exceptionally powerful tools for conveying sonic heaviness at the expense of other aspects of the music. It might even be so that the techniques in themselves has forced artists into a particular way of writing music. Either way, there appears to be a widespread discrepancy between the means of expression and what is actually being expressed in doom metal; which in turn provides clues as to what makes for a genuinely satisfying doom-offering. With the above discussion in mind, today’s written offering presents the Australian death/doom act Paramaecium – one of few bands bearing the doom-tag that has managed to write compositions to match the sonic gravitas associated with said style.
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Stoner Rock Is Not “Doom Metal”

Earlier this year, independent music distribution platform Bandcamp claimed that many stoner rock bands are in fact doom metal. This is a common logical fallacy based around associating the pace and instrumental tone of the music with actual musical content. The stoner “doom” trend of bands that started in the late 90s and early 2000s and has continued non-stop right up until the present almost twenty years later was one of the earliest hipster attempts to assimilate heavy metal before the waves of speed, death, and now black metal aesthetics rehashed into pop rock for the safe space generation.

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Crypt Sermon – Out of the Garden

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Heavy-Doom Metal, as I like to call everything that is merely slowed down heavy metal, is not known for being fertile ground for originality. It is a rather narrow sub-genre (more like sub-subgenre) which gives its adherents a very specific and rather primitive set of tools to work with and is at this point a retro-worship of classic and original acts like Candlemass. Hailing from Pennsylvania, USA, Crypt Sermon make no attempt to break off from this role of obvious emulation.

Out of the Garden should by no means be simply reduced to Candlemass-worship, but the influence is unmistakable. This is encouraging as one listens to the album for the first time and finds all the bells and whistles in the right places. The big, epic, long-drawn choruses, the guitar melodies, the climatic solos. It all harks back to the “catchy” selling points of Candlemass.

Once the brume has dissipated as the winds of repeated listens blow in, one realizes that this is everything Out of the Garden has to offer. This makes it a great release for those who want Candlemass without the trouble of having to digest all the meat of acts like Atlantean Kodex. The casual fan of epic heavy metal will have a blast with this new release.

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Funeral Circle – Funeral Circle

funeral_circle-funeral_circleI remember when I first realized that it doesn’t matter if a band clones its style. I was listening to the first General Surgery and thinking that, while it was basically a Carcass clone, it was also good. Pathologist followed that.

Funeral Circle is an unabashed and faithful Candlemass clone that manages to extend this style in a new direction through the band’s personality, which is slightly less purely dark than Candlemass’s. As a result, we end up with a doom metal band that puts more of an emphasis on epic atmosphere than purely doom atmosphere.

While this release does not have the fully formed personality that Candlemass did, it creates a middle of the room entry point to epic doom. Melodies sometimes borrow from alternative rock, folk and country; riffs are brought from the past with a sensibility derived from power metal, just slowed down. Sometimes, as in power metal, we hear a melodic sense similar to that of religious music.


Funeral Circle as a result is an enjoyable venture into creativity where atmosphere is the goal instead of crushing riffs or catchy choruses. This makes for a listening experience that like ambient music, hopes to store itself in the background and color consciousness, not abruptly direct it.

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