Slow Horse

New York's Slow Horse is named that for a reason. It's easily one of the slowest stoner doom metal bands ever recorded. Some of their songs push Cathedral's Forest of Equilibrium for slowest ever. But it's a damn good record. Every staple of stoner doom is here: Sabbath-worship riffs, nice drumming that keeps the slow tempo, and some pretty decent vocals by Daniel Bukhzpan. Although I think he sounds better on Slow Horse II, he does a pretty decent job here.

This album is a bit more depressive in it's lyrical content than the next release, and the music mirrors it. Lick My Wounds, No One Wants You When You Are Down, and All Good Intentions are slow crawler songs that barely crawl to their 6+ minute marks. If you really love Cathedral's old works, you should feel comfortable with the pace Slow Horse keeps on this album. They even went as far as to cover Chris Isaak's popular song, Wicked Game, and turn it into a plodding, strangely heavy song, and it's easily the best song on the album, not just for its novelty value, but mainly for it's good execution.

The only thing that bothers me about this release over Slow Horse II is the production. It's a little bit lacking. The drumming sounds pretty good, but sometimes it's hard to hear the kick drum, the guitar sound isn't too great, and Bukhzpan's vocals are sometimes drowned in the mix of guitars (In fact, Wicked Game is a good example of that), but even with it's production short-comings, this is definitely a good album for all stoner doom fans to try to find.