Sometimes, you don’t want something complex. While a fancy, flavorful dish bursting with spice and variety is well and good, there are times when you just need a damn cheeseburger. And musically, nothing is closer to the equivalent of a cheeseburger than sludgy stoner doom; it’s a tried-and-true perfected formula that works all the time, every time. Here, today, we have something exquisite from that very genre: a full stream of the new album from Las-Vegas-based act Demon Lung, who creates music that straddles the two genres perfectly with their gothic and plodding sound.
This is some pretty solid stuff, I’d say. Instrumentally, their approach is highly reminiscent of Neurosis, a crawling hulk of distorted heavy riffage, although vocally, it’s clear that Electric Wizard is strongly channeled here. This album, A Dracula, is the group’s third outing, and it’s clear that they’ve spent the time across those albums honing their craft to a fine point. The songwriting doesn’t feel overlong, a common issue with this genre, and everything hits heavily, with appropriate emphasis and power.
I was turned off a little by what I heard in the group’s earlier stuff: it showed a band with lots of inspiration and potential, but nothing particularly jumped out at me. However, I’m happy to say that the band has clearly stepped up the game quite nicely with this album and created a pretty powerful doom metal album. It’ll be interesting to see how this matches up to the response to Secrets of the Sky, Tempel, and Ufomammut, among other major doom metal bands to drop albums this year (so far).
A Dracula comes out via Candlelight Records on June 29. Listen here, and keep an eye peeled for our review going up sometime in the near future!
-SH