Sorrow My Name

Cause surely the guys never thought that with two full-lengths and an EP they had exhausted the doom metal topic. No, they haven’t, and although they continue delving in esoteric doomy waters with two other projects at present, Doomstress and Project Armageddon, it seems as though this initial stint was, and hopefully will be, producing tastier fruit.

The band was formed in 1997 and the “Black Reign” demo, which was their first creation, was an impressive slab of doom with a great cover of the freshly released Solitude Aeturnus’s “Idis” (from “Adagio”) wrapping it on. The trilogy of the same title was used as the backbone for the debut which further cemented the band’s reputation as harbingers of potent, high-octane classic doom, with a penchant for the more traditional side of the genre (think Saint Vitus, Pentagram, Count Raven).

Productivity is not exactly synonymous with the guys’ name as the album reviewed here appeared whole nine years after the first showing, with a solitary EP released in-between. The good news is that they have lost none of their initial ship-sinking splendour nailing one grand morose hymn after another with unflinching seismic authority which this time has a more flexible, epic-tinged physiognomy, the latter immediately detectable on the opening title-track and on the elegiac sprawling opus “Forsaken”. Sorrow and gloom are to be expected on such a recording, but when they come served with poignantly solemn balladic motifs like on “The Pain's Not Forgotten”, things come very close to the pleasantly soporific parametres, a great contribution to which is made by the excellent soulful clean vocals the guy occupying a niche of his own with a fairly characteristic nasal, protracted croon. Don’t’ expect any dynamic digressions, this is one of the very few recordings where such escapades are nowhere to be heard although the jumpy rhythms on “As I Die” can pass for something more energetic with the rowdier arrangements on “Ashes of Despair” another semblance of intensity, those attempts drowned in the epic grandeur of “A Dark Soul's Destiny”, a superb nod to the mentioned Solitude Aeturnus with the patiently-woven riff-patterns and the alluring melodic tunes.

A well of greatness this is in which the doom metal lovers would gladly dive in; the others may find these slow-burning soundscapes testing their patience to an extent as again there are no fast-paced temptations to be encountered anywhere; all is one seamless, quite homogenous spread out of epic, doom and gloom that engulfs the listener from the get-go and never lets him off, luring him/her in its seductive, hypnotic embrace.

It’s by no means over yet, in the camp of these well-diggers, and more concentration on this particular project of theirs in the near future is highly recommended regardless of how much faster the Apocalypse may come with these gorgeously oppressive music pageans around.