Few subgenres in metal have as many abilities to express music like doom. How many different combinations of “doom ___” can you think of? How many different variations on the sound have there been? I can think of quite a few, and I know for a fact that the sound…
A dark and foreboding greeting to you, heaviest of Heavy Bloggers! Yes, I’m afraid it’s that time again. The death of the year 2018 demands a review, and we would be quite foolish not to oblige. It’s been another very solid year for doom metal. Personal favorites and genre darlings…
Doom? Check. Death? I’m in. Stoner doom? Hell yes, gimme that. Psychedelic stoner death doom? Wait, wha? Such is the nature of metal bands sometimes. So frequently, we want bands to fit into boxes and check off things on our lists. Sure, it helps us writers explain to others what…
Greetings, heaviest of Heavy Bloggers! It’s that time of the month once again where we delve into the deepest of fuzzy riffs and slowest of bangers. I have to admit, I both love and hate this time of year when it comes to music. Everyone rushes to get their records…
As I mentioned a few days ago, one of the best things to come from the traditional metal revival, at least for me, is the resurgence of what’s often called “proto-doom”, that kind of slow, thick heavy metal that ruled supreme in the days before the doom genre fully crystallized.…
It’s that time of year. Yes, ‘tis the season for pumpkin spiced everything’s, knitted scarves and socks from your grandmother, and gorging on avian flesh in the name of antiquated traditions. To be perfectly honest, I’m not above the bullshit holiday thing. I just like spending time with my loved…
So it goes with doom and doom-adjacent artists, the suffocating wear-you-down nature leads to a common endgame. The physicality of gargantuan riffs and laborious rhythms take a toll, eroding one’s sunshiny disposition to a hopeless and dread-bogged torpor. Despite (or because of) this, we love it. We live to feel…
If High on Fire’s newest—Electric Messiah—was, in fact, inspired by a dream Matt Pike had about Lemmy, then opener “Spewn from the Earth” is a statement of purpose. Pike has always reminded me of Lemmy as a vocalist and High on Fire always incorporated a bit more thrash than some…
There is a long-running joke at the publication that I have called home for the past few years, Arctic Drones, that revolves around senile “Gramps” (at age 37, I am currently by far the oldest writer on our staff) consistently forgetting what he has previously written and declaring that every album he reviews is a “potential album of the year.” It has become so well-documented that, out of the desire to be as professional a writer as possible and avoid repetitious phrasings, I have made a very conscious effort to shy from such wording over the past year. Why lead with this potentially perplexing anecdote? Because Holy Fawn has finally released their first full-length record, Death Spells, and it is without hesitation and with full clarity of mind that I declare that it as, to this point, my choice for the best album of 2018.
Given that its impetus came with the sinister riff opening “Black Sabbath,” doom metal has arguably had the longest evolutionary stretch of any metal subgenre. Of course, just how much any given subgenre has evolved is difficult to pin down, especially considering the disparate directions and offshoots are present within each…
