Monolord – Rust

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One of the most appealing aspects of doom metal is its relative simplicity. Unconcerned with the breakneck tempos of grind, the technical necessity of trash and death, or the atmospherics (and, often, the aesthetics) of black metal, doom is largely content to let the genre’s music speak for itself. Of course, it helps to have the amp wattage to all but forcibly compel heads to nod but, at the end of the day, the riff is the riff and doom will live or die by the power of the riff alone. There’s something vaguely traditional in that simplicity: a reverent confidence that the power of one gnarly guitar line, repeated burgeoningly and ad nauseum, can transcend the need for other genre trappings and transfix a listener into zoned-out bliss. Generally speaking, doom worships no god but the riff and Monolord are here to spread that gospel.

MONARCH! – Never Forever

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Managing an album’s length is more than just a numbers game. As important as the song count and run time of a track list may be, an album’s experiential length is more closely linked to the content contained within each track. More specifically, this is defined not by the quality of an album’s ideas, but the quantity of those ideas, as well as their organization. As an example, consider your standard 20-ish minute, 20+ track grindcore album—though it may be shorter than most people’s morning commute, a band with the the most simple genre formula is introducing the listener to roughly two dozen song ideas, and if these ideas are executed poorly, the album is going to drag and lose its appeal despite presenting bite size compositions. This isn’t relevant to Never Forever because it suffers from an ineffective length; to the contrary, MONARCH! (Monarch, from here on out), have crafted an album with perfect pacing and structure that enhances the impact of the record. But the band operate in a genre rife with overindulgence, as evident by the sheer number of doom and drone metal albums comprised of a handful of tracks that each rival the entirety of a grindcore album while presenting barely enough ideas to rise above being musical melatonin.

Hey! Listen to Sundr!

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Subtlety isn’t a common approach when it comes to sludge metal, which rather favours blistering, distortion-focused guitars and thunderous drums since the notoriously volcanic heaviness of genre spearheads Electric Wizard and Weedeater. Although in a genre that finds it’s bands in a battle of extremes, seeing who can cause the most damage to the PA system with their amps, the 2010s have seen sludge been taken down a number of different avenues. We have Mastodon using it as a basis to conjure up progressive, multi-layered musical odysseys, Indian using noise experimentation to make it as hellishly freaky as possible, to Bongripper putting an emphasis on the direct riffs in creating a mood through repetition. However, we have Melbourne underground head-turners Sundr, dragging the style even further out to a much less assertive sound, yet a much more ethereal and tension-building experience on their vertiginous sophomore LP, The Canvas Sea. 

Mindkult – Lucifer’s Dream

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What’s to know or learn about Richmond, Virginia’s multi-instrumentalist Fowst? Not much, except that he’s the brains and sole instrumentalist behind the so-fuzzy-it-must’ve-died-and-now-it’s-molding doom project that is Mindkult. The one-man band approach is something that never fails to pique my interest. I get the notion that it’s often viewed as…

Big|Brave – Ardor

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Being a writer for Heavy Blog comes with a lot of perks. Unlimited beer in the break room fridge, the annual staff retreat to Bora Bora, an on-call office masseuse – these are just a few of the major draws for blog employees. But probably the most personally rewarding benefit…

Hey! Listen to Battle Hag!

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Battle Hag does not write riffs so much as they summon an unusually melodic thunderstorm. Tongue of the Earth is an apt name for the debut album; their doom metal swirls with primeval atmosphere that seems to rumble from the earth itself, rather than from any human artifice. This effect is accomplished by a tremendous attention to detail: the massive bass tone, the low and bestial growls, the slow and towering riffs, the sometimes-ritualistic percussion… the net result is that, at their absolute best, Battle Hag provides the distinct impression that the listener is cowering inside a shallow cave, helpless to explosions of thunder and bludgeons of debris while a formless predator roars in the distance. It’s pretty cool.

Doomsday – August 2017

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Hello Heavy Bloggers! Welcome to Doomsday, our new column that seeks to compile a monthly roundup of all things doom. Standing alongside the likes of Death’s Door and Kvlt Kolvmn, Doomsday will highlight a few releases every month that, for whatever reason, may not warrant a full-fledged review on Heavy Blog but we still think deserve a recommendation out to you, oh faithful readers. There’s a lot of music that can fit under the Doom umbrella and we’ll try to keep an “open ear” policy: Drone, Stoner, Groove, Ambient, Funeral Doom, and good ol’ Death-Doom. We’ll take all comers. If it’s slow and low, it’s Doomsday. And without further ado, here’s some of the heaviest tunes August had to offer.

Premiere: Take an Intergalactic Voyage on Howling Giant’s Black Hole Space Wizard (Part 2)

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Enter: Howling Giant. They have returned with their third release, Black Hole Space Wizard Part 2, and have turned out something quite awesome with their collection of blueprints. The band here are in fine form melding together some of the best elements of bands such as Coheed and Cambria, Elder, and Mastodon. The spacier prog rock of the first band collides with the low end progressive doom of the second before topping off the mix with a hint of the Atlanta stalwarts vocal style that swirls and builds to something quite satisfying. Hear this delightful concoction for yourself in our exclusive streaming premiere below.

Low Flying Hawks – Genkaku

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Doom metal, in its purest form, is Sisyphian, forever attempting to move its great weight over a seemingly unreachable peak. That that mythical figure was, well, doomed to his task for cheating death is an apt metaphor for the bleak artistry of this genre of metal. In attempting to establish where this particular scene lies in the greater schema of music right now we can look to this ancient myth as an apt metaphor. Taking into account the plethora of new releases, new Sisyphuses, pushing their own respective boulder-esque projects it’s easy to see that doom is in a bit of a renaissance, currently, as crucial (relatively) new bands such as Elder, Pallbearer, Dreadnought, and SubRosa have raised the bar for longtime practitioners.