So.Ill. So Strange

Doom Metal Work Week: Let’s kick the day off with the album that inspired the very name of the genre: Epicus Doomicus Metallicus by Candlemass. One of my favorite Doom albums for sure. If you’re a Sabbath fan but you want to go further, this is the one to start with!

Probably good I’m not in charge of all this shit because I would absolutely just start off by chopping off a lot of people’s heads.

Doom Metal Work Week: YOB make ponderous, deeply emotional, and monolithic song cycles that few can match in intensity or depth. 2018’s Our Raw Heart is their most recent release, and a contemporary classic.

Drinking beers and hanging curtains. I’ve gone Dad mode.

Doom Metal Work Week: Windhand are one of my favorite bands in the genre. The juxtaposition of the dreamy, pleading vocal delivery against the grinding, unrelenting guitar assault just hits all the right buttons. All their albums are fantastic, but 2013’s Soma may be my favorite.

Doom Metal Work Week: Out of the “Big 4” of Classic Doom Metal, Trouble may be the least well known. Their debut LP from 1984, Psalm 9 is a classic that helped define the genre. Its jam-packed with menacing riffage that’s alternately sludgy and soaring.

Doom Metal Work Week: Songwriting often takes a back seat to mood, texture, and pure riffage in the Doom genre; but Pallbearer have been writing Uber-heavy, complex song cycles for over a decade now. Their latest LP, Forgotten Days, is one of the finest records of 2020.

Doom Metal Work Week: If Scott “Wino” Weinrich’s presence in Saint Vitus resulted in ultra bleak, crawling dirges- The Obsessed were their motorcycle riding, joint smoking cousin. Lunar Womb borrows Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son for the cover art- a perfect touchstone.

I need a vacation from stress.

Doom Metal Work Week: A stone cold classic of the genre, every Doom guitarist out there feels like they’re still riffing on this one (excuse the pun). One of the most iconic album covers in all of metal, to boot.

Doom Metal Work Week: Japanese mainstays Boris have long been one of my favorite extreme metal groups. Their new album with Uniform, Bright New Disease, is blistering and uncompromisingly heavy.

Doom Metal Work Week: Here’s a Doom classic from the band that brought bleakness to the 90’s, Cathedral. This was their most most pure Doom album, before prog and assorted metal influences penetrated their sound.

Doom Metal Work Week: I’ll be posting Doom/Stoner/Sludge/Drone albums this week as I listen to them at the crystal shop! Kicking it off with a newer album- the debut LP from LA “fairy-doom” outfit Faetooth, Remnants of The Vessel.

Buried my Grandpa yesterday. Guitar amp stopped working. Depressed. Shit weekend.

He has seen continents divide, drift, and reform across gulfs of time unknowable to the human mind. He watched as the first primordial life clawed its way onto land and gasped its first breaths. He has borne witness to eternities.

They told you it’s Grimace’s Birthday (if he was, indeed, born in any true sense of the word), but they didn’t say how old he is. The truth is nobody’s sure. He’s some eldritch thing from the dark corners of time immemorial. His loathsome, fungous form has somehow persevered.

@CrampToe Big if true

Tomorrow is 90’s shoegaze, get ready babe

Bless my partner for dealing with the whiplash of me listening to extreme metal all day one day, then 70’s country the next.

Get yourself a boss that says things like “can you put on, like, real music?” when you’re trying to listen to Drone Metal.