Caveman Battle Doom: Conan - Revengeance (2016)

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Sleeping giants rise as chariots circle. A hand of steel rains fire as the earth cracks and fury spews from below. Steeds flee up mountainsides as blacks shapeless warriors hunt, a choking black cloud follows their every move. Revengeance is the soundtrack to an ancient and mystical warfare, the battle-cry of desolate armies, the dying moments of a monumental battle. Conan are oppressive doom titans from the North-West and with their third album Revengeance have chiseled a much more complete and well-rounded album from the carrion remains of Blood Eagle and Monnos.

There is a much greater urgency from the get go here as 'Throne of Fire' begins with a rapid fire barrage of doom speed before the song crawls to a pained stop. The disharmonious duel vocals breakthrough the slabs with power: the deep, airy gasps of bassist Chris Fielding cling to the surface like smog while Jon Davis' battle cries pierce like a poisonous arrow. They have a primal vulnerability that works so well. The song picks up pace again as the drumming comes to life: a rising giant. 

'Thunderhoof' begins with a less deep and cavernous riff, the song climbs higher, crawling up the mountainside. It's repetitive, imprinting it's fuzzy hooves into the memory.  The fourth track, 'Wrath Gauntlet', is slab after slab of drawn out doom that creaks and ruptures from all angles. It's a vast and loud sound: the guitars, as expected, are fizzing and flaming war-hammers. Conan are unforgiving andm carrying on the with ancient warfare imagery, they confront you from head-on, looking you in the eye as they gallop towards you with obscenely large war-hammer in hand. Revengeance - on the surface - is not subtle, it won't sneak up on you and cut your throat (although the drumming is rather nuanced and subtle at times).

With the speed of a thousand burning rocks hurled from catapults 'Revengeance' begins, striking in its change of pace following 'Wrath Gauntlet'. The single from the album is a stampede of sound: the thumping mammoth heavy drumming is littered with meaty blast-beats, the guitars also intensify with mid-paced riffing and high pitched feedback. There is a much greater diversity throughout Revengeance as a whole; the second half especially espouses a more classic doom sound with the occasional stoner-desert-classic sounding riff progression. Beneath the thick crust of fuzz, 'Every Man Is An Enemy', solid riffs dance among the chugs. 'Earthenguard' opens with a Kyuss desert-rock trembling, slowly finding a groove: a victorious army swaggering around - or fleeing from - the battlefield. It cascades into demented Mastodon-esque vocals with a heavy plodding rhythm. The drums once are once again  are captivating: new - for this album - drummer Rich Lewis really fits in. I'm not a drum expert but in them seems a vaguely jazzy fluidity that counteracts with the rigid slabs of sound from the guitars. A slow saxophone sounding solo emerges at 9.20 as the drums also cannonball and explode, it's a really glorious ending to the album.

I've always really appreciated Conan for there no nonsense and no vvimps approach to the doomier side of metal. They have a great aesthetic and their albums set an incredible tone and paint powerful images. (Also their album artwork is my favourite in metal; check out the artwork of Anthony Roberts here). Some may say that they are repetitive, but, in my opinion, that's their strongest weapon; they build their songs, layer on layer, slowly and simply but to great effect. Long may battle doom continue.

Album Review: Witchcraft - Nucleus (2016)

I wasn't expecting much from this when I first saw it scheduled for release. That's not to say that I dislike Witchcraft, its just that there's only so much retro-occult-trendy Sabbath inspired doom that I can stomach. Witchcraft have a great ear for melody and a distinctive vocalist in Magnus Pelander, and I was expecting a similarly melodic hard-rock sounding album following on from their 2012 release Legend.

From the moment the first riff in 'Maelstrom' hit me I realised my preconceived judgments were wrong. Nucleus is a much more aggressive, downbeat, melancholic album; its dirtier and heavier than Legend, in fact it has some of the heaviest stuff they've ever done. It's partly psychedelic Sabbath worship with soulful blues and David Gilmour-esque guitar solos but it also has a sludgy and melancholic heaviness similar to that of more recent Katatonia and Anathema. 

'Maelstrom' an eight minute opener of plodding doom that slowly builds,  has the textured sparsity of Saint Vitus and the feel of early Sabbath and as the song progresses quicker riffs, forlorn vocals and heavy drumming swirl to powerfully. I never expected such oppressiveness from Witchcraft,

'Nucelus' at fourteen-minutes begins with an occult rock sound akin to Pentagram, before delving into a regal sounding epic with melodies not to different from Pallbearer's Sorrow and Extinction. Pelander's vocals on this album - and this song in particular - are much more forceful and wild, often building from sweet melodies to exasperated gruffness, and for this heavier retro-doom sound his vocals are really great. Flutes, (taken from a secret Jethro Tull album it seems), keyboards and an acoustic interlude build as a downcast group chant leads into a guitar solo and, to be honest, a rather flat ending.

The final track, 'Breakdown', at nearly 16-minutes, is an absolute monster of a song and by itself notches my rating up by a few points. After opening with eerie droning sound,s akin to Earth, and slow, downcast vocals the amps crackle and the voice of Sylvia Plath reads from 'The Stones': 'Drunk as a foetus, | I suck at the paps of darkness [...] This is the after hell, | I see the light.' leading to creaking riffs that sound on the verge of exploding and there really is a foreboding sense of that everything is about to fall apart; the vocal delivery becomes more erratic as Pelander sings of ‘a sick black smoke stored in my cells, coming out of me | I’m possessed, undigested, it dwells deep inside of me.’ as the guitar screech and whimper and the drums pound like slabs of meat and even at one point the vocals turn to semi-whimpers similar to those of Niklas Kvarforth of Shining. 

It's a long album at one hour and nine minutes - maybe too long. The longer songs are broken up by shorter, more hard rock based songs and I feel this juxtaposition is to the albums detriment. With the omission of a few songs the album, in my opinion, would be a more compact, focused and heavy album.The shorter songs on the album, although decent enough, distract a listener from the heavy, oppressive atmosphere of some of the longer songs.

Rating: 7.5/10

New Song: Agoraphobic Nosebleed - 'Deathbed'

Supersonic Pig-Destroyer trapped in the matrix, glitching and writhing in a tortured bionical state; a modulated robotic dystopia, brain in a vat type stuff, floating in a jelly-heavy fluid as men in lab coats and laughing men in suits and shades feed wires under fingernails and beneath eyelids. Chaos induced artificially:  Agoraphobic Nosebleed - spearheaded by guitarist and drum programmer Scott Hull of Pig Destroyer fame - are an inhuman species.

This new song, 'Deathbed', from their upcoming album Arc (Scheduled for release on the 22nd of January) is less sonic and electronically pounding, relying on a more gritty, dirty, human vulnerability. It's still monstrous and cloying -with elements of a futuristic cyber-grind torture always threatening to break through - but with a more guitar-led focus: slow doomy riffs make way for groovy stoner riffs that maintains an oppressive nihilistic edge like that of doom titans Electric Wizard. Vocals are more prominent; in place of a chaotic and mathy dissonance is a more raspy, straight-forward aggression that reminds me of the haunting vocals of Indian and Lord Mantis. 

Judging by the artwork, this album is giving me a post-nuclear disaster feel where civilisation has been grinded down and stripped bare. Within this context this change in style makes sense. 

It's interesting to see how the album plays out; I'm quite excited by their more conventional leanings but I hope they maintain that unconventional grind vibe that attracted me to them in the first place. Metal Sucks is exclusively (woah exclusive!) the new song: http://www.metalsucks.net/2016/01/08/exclusive-track-premiere-agoraphobic-nosebleeds-deathbed/

Agoraphobic Nosebleed also released another track a few weeks back, a seven-minute sledgehammer of a song: 'Not a Daughter'. It's a nuclear warhead heavy bluesy-doom track that would slot nicely into early an 90's Melvin's album. You can listen to it below.