Cult of Bathory

This review first appeared on Deaf Sparrow's Facebook page on 14 May 2016. Written by Stanley Stepanic.

Sigh. Oh Yidhra, Yidhra Yidhra Yidhra... Too often do I see album reviews filled with glittering generalities and the usual thesaurus-flipper verbage. Even Invisible Oranges gave this one something of a wink-and-thanks. What happened to that site anyway? Oh well, I guess there's us, or me, rather. This quartet has written the manual "How to be an Average-at-Best Doom Band." It's a pretty simple recipe, here, try it yourself at home:

1. Source old photo from Tumblr.
2. One dash of Elizabeth Bathory reference.
3. Add mountain(s).
4. Make sure the word 'iron' is used at least once for flavor.
5. Riff like it's 1979.
6. Solo like it's 1992.
7. Add witch, probably something about religion too.
8. Make sure there's a naked girl somewhere with skulls and stuff, that's esoteric and dark AF.

Yeah, that basically summarizes "Cult of Bathory." Yidhra do not fail in the quest to be average, in fact they're so genius at it you'll scarcely notice anything they're doing. Are these your own riffs? Pretty sure they're not, or it's a case of cryptomnesia, to give them the benefit of the doubt. Part of the plague of modern doom is anything going with the 'stoner' tag addendum typically has nothing new to offer. Sometimes that's okay, but not if you want to objectively call something awesome. These guys are great musicians, sure, but they're nothing you haven't consumed before, and you're probably a little bloated by 2016 with all of the weed-worship "My father made me listen to Sabbath as a babe" nonsense. I daresay most of what you're going to hear in this one is stale and completely uninspired. Some of the riffs are surprisingly thin, and the bass is what keeps them going, though you can imagine the bassist takes too many pictures of his rig on Facebook for the world to see (read as: only the friends who like the picture). Yeah, this is that kind of band. "We drink beer and write doom, up next is Sleep we have tapes and shirts for sale." The main sting, however, and most unfortunately, is the vocals, which sound exactly like Pat Kilbane making fun of Rob Zombie (singing a Star Wars song no less) on Mad TV in the 90s. Seriously, look up that video on Youtube and compare. That in itself is probably worth a score of no higher than 1, but the playing is solid enough to pull out a save.