Drawn out heavier songs have not always been apart of doom metal, Candlemass and other bands had started the tradition. Yet for some listeners the drawn out "heavier" sections with little variation in riffs, may tend to be tedious and as opposed to heavy dull and flat. I bought Into the rectory of the Bizarre reverend hoping to enjoy it, and it quickly became background music due to the lack of interesting riffs for example. Is the doom template of unvaried riffs and long drawn out sections without even minor tempo changes doomed to just be dull, or is it just the perspective of looking for varied doom misguided? What are some albums that you've heard that have 7+ minute long songs, that have different instrumentals, riffs, and things going on that show that a lot can be done in time alotted?

Yes and no. Bands that play the same riff over a long period of time can be extremely boring. However playing a riff with some changes like leads/delay/effects and different vocal lines is awesome and I really like it. If a riff is really catchy/groovy/interesting to me it can play for a longer time and it won't matter how long they play it. Some bands can do it better then other bands it seems.

What exactly was there before Candlemass anyway that constituted a whole genre? Sabbath, Pentagram's old demos and what not...pretty sure Candlemass were the bedrock foundation on which the larger genre came about, or at least a large part of it.

It's about songwriting. Briton Rites, for example, while being more trad metal influenced in parts, is a great example of long, slow songs that never get dull. Bands like Hour of 13 and Blood Ceremony play songs of all kinds of lengths and do just fine. But the new Sabbath songs and most Reverend Bizarre stuff is an example of the opposite - just weak, etc.

Yes.

Veracs is really my number one enemy, I would bitchslap him in the face so hard. But yeah, I usually really enjoy the long doom songs but I don't like drone much, it's a matter of taste, I guess. If you have the attention span of a 3 years old on pepsi, of course So Long Suckers would be long and boring.

Overlong songs in any genre are doomed to be boring, that's what makes them overlong, really. While I've never listened to Revered Bizarre, if there truly is very little variation over the course of a long song, then I'm totally with Veracs in the sense that that would probably annoy the hell out of me. But that's really just a fundamental rule of music for me, not necessarily doom metal.

Yeah, well won't this template also apply to some black metal as well? I get what you're saying but I feel it's not really about the stretching of the song which kills doom music. It's the poor arrangement of doom music on the part of the band which makes the songs come off as boring. For example, I think with time, Pallbearer did that to me and I sort of lost interest. There are some bands (I listen to select few doom bands) which might get it right like Mourning Beloveth's Dust. Long songs but they don't seem drawn out to me. The band actually makes it interesting by incorporating a mix of vocal styles, variation in riffs, good atmosphere etc.

A song is only overlong if it sucks. Since not everybody can agree on the latter, not everybody can agree on the former. I really hate exercises in song length just for the sake of it but I can enjoy a long song if it is organic and great. Any gimmick just for the sake of it (technique, speed, song length) sucks ass. Period. But if done well, anything can rule.

Now, having said that I do think more and more bands are slightly stretching things to the point of being irrelevant. CD length has gone up and it seems a lot of bands feel pressured into delivering longer albums and longer songs. One thing that was really amazing about the 60s, 70s and early 80s is that more bands in general knew about keeping the songs shorter on albums and actually JAM them live, extending them organically. Nobody's gonna complaint if Hendrix, Zeppelin or Metallica extend a song by a few minutes and enthrall an audience live. The problem is when you try to overextend studio tracks with repetitive tripe.

Bands who wish to experiment should play looser live and experiment there, to the benefit of everybody.

(To repeat: there are exceptions. Some bands come up with really cool long songs)

Even with a given band it changes for me on a song by song basis. I've never listened to Reverend Bizarre's Cirith Ungol without either falling asleep or my mind wandering in a million directions. On the OTHER hand I could listen to They Used Dark Forced/Teutonic Witch at any given moment of any day because despite being longer than an episode of Seinfeld it's incredibly engaging.

There seems to be an issue these days with bands assuming that length = atmosphere. Nuh uh.

I have the attention span of a housefly and I still enjoy that album.

For me it's a matter of the song(or riff/section/etc) overstaying its welcome. I don't use any particular standard to measure it against, but as a rule, overdrawing the length for the hell of it=shit. Like Khanate, a band that is really hit and miss with me. I'm fine with songs like Commuted and Capture, both of which clock around 20 minutes, while Every Goddamn Thing, 32min, is a chore to listen, it feels like they could have compressed the song to half its length and it would still have the same atmosphere without the downside of being fucking annoying. Incidentally my favorite song of theirs are the shorter, 12 min at max ones, like Wings From Spine and No Joy. I'd say that 10~min is the ideal "long doom song" length. More than that few bands can pull it off, one example being the song Anywhere Out Of This World by RevBiz, which is 25 min long(on the other hand Cirith Ungol, with a similar length, is boring as shit) and Corrupted, which constantly pulls off songs longer than half an hour.

Mournful Congregation says no.

Mournful Congregation to me is the most boring/bland music I've heard. Actually counter productive to the argument.

To each his own. I find them very interesting and unique, especially within their subgenre. Music is varied enough to keep you guessing what comes next (rare feat for funeral doom) while maintaining the necessary flow and atmosphere.

Then again, I don't really think variation is playing the same riff for 5-6 minutes and adding effects, delays or tempo changes to make it seem sound less redundant.

Hell, it happens in black metal too, but again variation is key. Trist's "Poslední cesta" does it wrong. Elysian Blaze's "Pyramid of the Cold Son" does it right.

Depends on the band and style I guess. I tend to bore much quicker if the band is more traditional or easier listening, so as such Reverend Bizarre is about my least favourite doom band in the world. On the other hand I am a huge funeral doom fan, again leaning away from the friendlier, sadder acts though. I love my torture doom and some of that shit is effectively riffless, like say, Moss's Sub Templum doesn't have a single actual riff, and has songs that run for 25 minutes, but I still.like it. I think it has to do with the more melodic and easy going bands being too clean and smooth, making their repetition stand out even more due to the precision of the sound and tight melody making each loop of the identical riff be more noticeable for its sameiness. The more extreme bands tends to eschew traditional vocal lines and the drums degrade into virtually unrelated clunking, so the sound isn't as identical each time making it both more interesting, and more unsettling from the "not quite right" aspects.

The long songs of course have a final upside which is what makes doom the genre out there, if a band comes up with a great riff, you can almost guarantee you'll get three minutes of it to blast your face off, and no other genre can offer that sort of simplistic pure joy.

If I had to actually pick the genres biggest flaw, it would not be length or simplicity, it would be the genres propensity for sadness. Moping, sad doom is ridiculously over done and it causes more boring one not chords and keyboard lines than anything else, there is some great sad doom no doubt, but damn, the genre has so many more directions that don't get explored as much, it can be horrific, devastingly brutal, spazzed out and weird, just plain old riffy, unsettling and creepy, but no, 90% will still jist make sad poems about death and witches.

I've often found that to be the case. I have nothing against long songs if they hold the listener's attention for that time span, but with down-tempo songs it's hard to get it right. I enjoy a good epic doom metal song as much as anybody, but even the best doom metal bands fall victim to the "over-long to the point of boringness" phenomenon. Antoine, Jonpo and Genghis mentions Reverend Bizarre and that's a perfect example. I really like that band- Some of their songs are outstanding- when I first heard "Funeral Summer" for instance I was instantly hooked. But many of their other songs are, well, just too dang long, and I can see why people would get sick of them in a hurry. One other point, one long, down-tempo song per album is fine, but when the entire album consists of epic-length slow songs, it gets to be too much to hold a listener's attention; you got to have the variation in tempo. If not within one song, then certainly within a full album.

When it comes to doom metal, overlength to me is a necessary evil, as the slow kind of doom just needs a certain amount of time to work at all. If you only got slow songs with looong, drawn out riffs it will naturally take longer to finish a song than, say, if you throw fast thrash riffs at the listener with a fury...

So, for me, overlength is not killing doom metal, it's rather a defining characteristic of the genre...

Some bands do kill songs with long, drawn out sections without variation. There's a sort of obsession with tone-basking without the necessary instrumental interplay that derived from the bluesy origins of doom as well as the jazz-influenced and upbeat drumming of Bill Ward - this seems fairly prominent in the more recent generation of stoner doom bands that tend to be heavily influenced by Electric Wizard, who were the first to gain a lot of attention for making spaced-out droning sections that fell flat and were simply boring. Sabbath influence carried hard through the 90s with bands like Sleep, who even with their long, droning, repetitive hour of Dopesmoker still had a driving rhythm, and the song never stopped. Holy Mountain had amazing interaction between the bass and drums, and even early Electric Wizard did the same, but starting with Dopethrone, Electric Wizard started emphasizing boring, listen-to-the-fuzz sections, and after their original lineup separated and they went with two guitarists, they basically completely forgot about the bass and drums and focused purely on guitar riffs, which falls really flat in doom metal.

Long, drawn-out doom metal sections can be good, and a guitar playing one chord for two minutes can be great, but the bass and drums need to take the lead. However, a lot of recent doom bands seem to have tunnel vision on guitar riffs, focusing on them while the rest of the band more or less keeps time, something that worked for rapidly changing thrash metal, but doesn't work when your riffs are slow and long. With the accessibility of such a wide variety of amps, especially desirable ones now, too many doomsters just bask on a fuzzy, buzzy tone without doing anything interesting, it's their version of chugga-chugga stuff, equally boring but in a slightly different way. Funny how Sleep's Holy Mountain originally contained a note saying "If you have Orange Amplifiation for sale, contact Sleep through Earache Records" but now you can get Orange amps just about anywhere.

eh, I can get where you're coming from and I agree for the most part but damn, I think if the riffs are GREAT (like in Electric Wizard's case most of the time) they can get by. Nothing wrong with good ol' tone worship. There's a time and a place for everything.

As for Reverend Bizarre, I think only So Ling Suckers has the overlong problem and that's because it's MEANT TO BE OVERLONG. Really, there's one good song and the rest is almost a fuck you to everyone.

So long suckers is probably the most boring mum doom album in the world.

Slow riffs means less musical content per minute, so you've generally got to have more minutes in doom. You can fit a lot more thrash into a two minute song than doom. And to confirm what other dudes have said, a song is overlong if it sucks. Like Rev Biz

It's ok for black metal to be repetitive and monotonous since those are qualities we black metal fans actually like about it. If this is the case for doom metal fans as well then you guys'll be just fine.

I'm not sure what you'd consider monotonous black metal, but many long black metal songs are definitely full of variation.

Wait -- what? Not at all. Maybe I'm in a minority here, but I personally don't care at all for Burzum-worshipping aimlessly repetitive black metal. If any band describes an album as "hypnotic," that's my cue not to listen, because it'll mean two-riff 10 minute long songs. Maybe it's worse for doom to be repetitive, but I don't think any metal should be overly so.

You can't always listen to doom for the riffs though. A lot of it is atmospheric, or is created for the sole purpose of being enveloped in sweet distortion and loudness. That being said a lot of doom is very emotional and dark, not exactly the first thing every metalhead thinks of when they're in the mood for metal.

They were a band in mind I had when creating this thread. They are a band of decent moments, but sitting through the Monad of Creation was fucking agonizing.

They got a lot busier after that album, I find that one a little dry myself, and I hate that fucking acoustic song.

Slow songs can also kill Doom Metal, just for the record. By nature it's supposed to be long.

Agreed!

Reverend Bizarre may have long, repetetive songs, but the drumming saves much. I think it's the most important part that makes their records. With a worse drummer it would be REALLY boring.

Couldn't disagree more regarding Poslední cesta. I consider that song to be a prime example of effective use of repetition and slow, drawn-out buildups to enhance the emotion of a song. I actually think Blood Geometry falls victim to overlong songs, and they're also disjointed in my opinion - sure, there's more variation, but the riffs don't flow naturally from one to the next, they may as well be separate songs.

Mournful Congregation have excellent album concepts. But like a lot of death/doom bands, have overly long and boring songs!

They kill a lot of my interest in post-80's/early 90's doom metal. Even bands in styles I enjoy, like Scald and Solstice, get plays about once a year or less because of the time invested and how little I'll get out of the whole album vs ~half of it. When it comes to the fuzz-focused stoner/doom mentioned above, I cannot even tolerate most of it. But I also dislike the entirety of "atmospheric" black metal and lean towards trad and thrash, so obviously a lot of it comes down to what one wants out of metal.




Epicus Doomicus Metallicus didn't only feature "drawn out heavier songs". Actually, aside from Demon's Bell I wouldn't describe any of the songs from the album like that. Saint Vitus was doing it much earlier with Burial At Sea and The Psychopath, for example. When you look at other early epic doom bands like Solitude Aeturnus that came basically directly from Candlemass, it's clear that they were more significant in incorporating more classic/power metal melody, singing, and atmosphere more than anything else.

Electric Wizard has pretty long songs which are really good and dont get boring, repetition makes them better because the trippy atmosphere is enhanced by the repetition so its even more trippy, and its all like "doaaap throoooaaan" and its glorious.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWHplp10kQM
I sometimes even feel like its too short, so i put it on repeat.

man, apparently it's become cool to trash Reverend Bizarre. They were one of the best bands ever. Only So Long Suckers has songs that could be deemed OVERlong and even there, I don't mind the 'fat,' I just enjoy the journey. In the Rectory is a masterpiece.

You all need to appear before the high council of doom Bishops and answer for your falseness.

I think they flow perfectly. I'd sooner have that than have the same three fucking riffs played over and over again with no tempo change over the course of 23 minutes.

Nah, I'm in it for the riffs.

I think it's all a matter of taste. I really like Electric Wizard's drugged up, zoned out passages. I'd probably like them even better if I was doing drugs while listening to them. I mean, it's really not about length. If it's just repetition, then it can get old. Obviously not doom, but a good example of that is a lot of recent Exodus stuff. Some of those songs seem to go on forever and it's just the same thing over and over.

Repetitive, yes. Monotonous, no.

As a person that creates (I would hope) somewhat competent funeral doom and atmospheric black metal, the key is to be constantly introducing new musical ideas and textures, not focusing on one element too much that you overdo it to death.

If a long song is good, then it isn't overlong. I think we all agree on that, though.

In general, I have a pretty high tolerance for long, repetitive music. With doom especially, I think part of the point is for the music to be emotionally draining and the long, slow, repetitive nature of a lot of it is meant to drain the listener. That doesn't mean doom can't pump the listener up as well (cases in point: High on Fire, Elder, Black Pyramid, etc.), but most long/slow/repetitive doom leaves me feeling tired, down, and drained rather than bored, and that's what the experience should be like IMO.

Well, doom metal and monotony are synonymous to each other. If a person gets bored quickly I'd advice him/her to keep away from doom metal in general.


Seconded. As well as Sleep.