The Fallen

This is the album that fulfills all the hysterical paranoia of late twentieth century parent's fears of drugs influencing their offspring's minds and causing them to turn to more drugs, sex, satanism, even more drugs and insanity - Reefer Madness brought to life. I'm sure it gives Jus Osborne a warm feeling inside to think what a record like this must do to the sensibilities of the so-called moral arbiters of the world as he feeds on their hypocritical outrage like some kind of mental vampire.
Musically it takes the original template for stoner doom laid down by Sleep, slows it down, makes it exponentially heavier and lyrically more outrageous to produce the standard against which other stoner doom albums are measured. Funeralopolis, Weird Tales, Dopethrone and I, The Witchfinder are the very epitome of what stoner metal is all about. It's been a long, long time since I last got stoned, but all I have to do is put on a pair of headphones, turn out the lights and crank this up to take me back there again.

Once more, great playlist Daniel. That DJing experience is really coming in handy! Although I must admit the ending had me a bit flummoxed.

Anyway here's a few random thoughts on the tracks:

01. Cult of Luna – “Finland” (from “Somewhere Along the Highway”, 2006)
Atmo-sludge, post-metal, whatever you wish to call it is still a relatively new musical discovery for me apart from Isis, but with this and last month's offering from Pelican I am finding myself drawn to it more and more. Properly atmospheric.

02. Sleep – “Dragonaut” (from “Sleep’s Holy Mountain”, 1992)
The stoner doom pioneers wreathe Master of Reality / Vol.4 Sabbathian riffs in dopesmoke and force them straight to the mid-brain.

03. Cathedral – “Schizoid Puppeteer” (from “Serpent’s Gold”, 2004)
Originally only available on the 1996 Rise Above sampler Dark Passages II, this is one of Cathedral's great unknown tracks. Stoner metal songwriting ambition that Lee Dorrian excels at.

04. Boris – “Introduction” (from “Akuma No Uta”, 2005)
Wall of sound drone as Boris seem to do better than almost everyone else. Like it.

05. Pallbearer – “Foreigner” (from “Sorrow & Extinction”, 2012)
After a gentle strummed intro Pallbearer kick in with a crushing riff for ten minutes of ultra-heavy "pure" doom metal that the band have never bettered.

06. Trees Of Eternity – “Gallows Bird” (from “Hour Of The Nightingale”, 2016)
Despite not being a big fan of this album I actually really like this when heard in the context of the playlist, particularly after the cataclysmic heaviness of Pallbearer.

07. Draconian – “The Apostasy Canticle” (from “Arcane Rain Fell”, 2005)
As I've said before, I'm not a big fan of Gothic Doom, but this I like and will certainly be giving this album a spin.

08. My Dying Bride – “She Is The Dark” (from “The Light At the End Of The World”, 1999)
See above, although in light of the last couple of tracks, maybe I'm better disposed to gothic doom than I suspected!

09. Shape Of Despair – “Reaching The Innermost” (from “Monotony Fields”, 2015)
Funeral doom is one of my absolute favourite genres and this is one of the (many) reasons why. Bleak and claustrophobic as layer upon layer of melancholic atmosphere are built up to envelop the listener in a lightless blanket of doom.

10. Pig Destroyer – “Natasha” (from “Natasha” EP, 2008)
OK, I'll have to get back to you on this one!?

Consider me a fan of the playlists, I enjoyed listening to this even more than I expected. A couple of old favourites and plenty of really good stuff I hadn't heard before. Nicely done, Daniel.

Some thoughts on the actual tracks themselves:

1. Boris - "EVOL" (from "LφVE & EVφL", 2019)
8/10. I love Feedbacker, but aren't super-familiar with Boris other than that.
Love this - will check the album out soon.

2. Pelican - "Last Day Of Winter" (from “The Fire In Our Throats Will Beckon The Thaw”, 2005)
10/10. Never heard these guys before. This is great - right up my alley!

4. Paradise Lost – “Faith Divides Us – Death Unites Us” (from “Faith Divides Us – Death Unites Us”, 2009)
6/10. I'm no big fan of PL and I don't feel this changing my mind.

5. Crowbar – “Planets Collide” (from “Odd Fellows Rest”, 1998)
7/10. Another band I'm unfamiliar with. Not bad at all, it's sludge has a kind of grungy vibe to it.
Great guitar tone.

6. Om – “Bedouin’s Vigil” (from “Bedouin’s Vigil/Assyrian Blood” split single with Six Organs Of Admittance, 2006)
6/5. I like Pilgrimage. This is OK, but sounds a bit weak and just sort of peters out at the end.

7. Domovoyd – “Domovoyage” (from ”Domovoyd”, 2015)
8/10. Gets off to a slow start but builds nicely. Has a rocket-fuelled space rock vibe to it that I'm quite keen on.

8. Candlemass – “Mirror Mirror” (from “Ancient Dreams”, 1988)
8/10. From my least favoured of Candlemass' first four albums, this is possibly it's best track.

9. Graveworm – “Scars Of Sorrow” (from “Collateral Defect”, 2007)
5/10. Sorry, not my sort of thing at all.

10. Skumring – “De glemte tider” (from “De glemte tider”, 2005)
9/10. Love this album. Love this track - ethereal and melancholy.

11. Saturnus – “Starres” (from “For The Loveless Lonely Nights” EP, 1998)
8/10. I like Saturnus' brand of death doom, but haven't heard this before. Like it.

12. Corrupted – “Inactive” (from “Northgrush/Corrupted” split, 1997)
7/10. Another band I'm totally unfamiliar with, but this is some seriously ultra-heavy shit. Pity the production is also shit, but I'll definitely be checking these guys out further.

As is the trend with me, I really didn't like Leviathan when I first heard it. I was really early into discovering Metal and I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on, and the vocalist really rubbed me the wrong way. After becoming more initiated I went back to it and ended up agreeing with all of you that it's a fantastic themed record that has a ton going for it. The drum fills throughout the album are absolutely wicked, with each measure seeming to have some sort of fill stuck in there somewhere. The twists and turns that the album takes are effortlessly integrated, like the strange but endearing guitar lick in the middle of "Megalodon" before it absolutely explodes into a massive chugfest. It's an easily approachable and digested slab of chaos that doesn't cut corners but manages to stay on the less extreme side of things, even though the guitar tone and some of the vocals would lead you to believe otherwise. 

Crack The Skye is Mastodon's most complete album, but Leviathan shows them mastering the sludgy but complex style in really creative ways. Comparing Leviathan to Emperor of Sand, like Saxy was alluding to, this earlier Mastodon record simply has more interesting riffs that lean into being difficult to fully understand but never being overly pretentious. As Mastodon have latched onto a more straightforward sound over the years, a lot of the excitement and rawness that this album had just faded away a bit. 

4/5

Weighing Souls With Sand is a heavy album. Heavy in emotion, heavy in distortion, heavy in feel and style. Even though it feels like I'm echoing Daniel's exact thoughts here, it's definitely a one-trick album with a solid premise but not that much exploration. It appeals to a very niche audience that can milk its style for all its worth, finding some sort of deeper meaning and, in the process, evoking some sort of crushing primal emotion. I'm not one of those people either, so this record falls pretty flat after the first track. It's beautiful, it's certainly unique in the way that it uses abrasively loud distortion to layer in other sounds to create something admittedly beautiful, but it all just sounds the same after the first ten minutes. Even the more minimalist percussion sections get played out by the end, despite sounding amazingly echo-y and vast. This is just one of those albums where I can admit that I see why some think it's a masterpiece, but I certainly think it's overrated as well. 

3.5/5

I must disagree Xephyr,  I only very rarely find that gothic metal sounds sincere (and this ain't it). I do agree about the Idle Hands album, though - I just found it boring. However, I've just looked back at my RYM list for last year and I gave it 3/5. Wow, I must have really been in a good mood that day! It was still only #376 on my year list, though.

Inspired by Chris Van Ettan splitting hairs over which genre an album from a different clan has (thrash or speed metal, death metal or grindcore, power metal or trad metal and sludge vs. stoner vs. doom), I decided to continue the DIS vs DAT activity with an interesting twist; instead of voting on which album has the greater edge, we do it with genres from one of the clans instead. Single-genre clans (like The Gateway and The Sphere) would be divided into hidden subgenres that some of us have heard of but are never listed in the site (for example, alternative metal vs nu metal, industrial metal vs neue Deutsche härte). This should be a nice interesting challenge for Chris and other members of the site. Got two or three albums from a different genre in the same clan and same release year but can't decide which one has the greater edge? Share them here!

Let's starts off with two Fallen albums released in 2005, one of which I've already listened to myself. If you have been following my journey through The Fallen Modern Era Clan Challenge, you probably know which one I like better, but I won't tell you until I get at least one or a few responses. Which one of these albums with a different genre has the greater edge? Choose one and explain the reason!

Doom metal:

Gothic metal:

I posted a review of Monotheist a while back, so I won't regurgitate it here, other than to say that I have to admit to having come to the album a little late. The reason is that by the time of it's release I had given up on the band. I loved their first three releases and they are still some of my favourite albums of all time, but since Into the Pandemonium the band seemed hell-bent on self destructing. Cold Lake, Vanity / Nemesis and then the reformed band's Prototype demo were pretty much crap, not merely sub-standard with the band unable to put together a stable line-up.

So when Monotheist was originally released in 2006 my reaction was "so what?" Well more fool me, as Tom and the guys totally killed it with the slowing of their original thrash riffing to a more doom metal pace is absolutely right up my street. One of the great albums of the 2000s, and the springboard to Tom G. Warrior's next project Triptykon.

To Mega Therion will always remain my favourite CF album, as it means so much to me on a personal level, but this is a damn close second.

For my first time listening to this behemoth, I can safely say that this was a test of patience more than anything else. Normally when bands release an hour long song or jam session it's divided into different parts that house different ideas and qualities, but in Sleep's case "Dopesmoker" legitimately revolves around a single riff. And most of the time that riff is a single note or small chord progression repeated over, and over, and over. That being said, this album is easily the most Stoner of any Stoner Metal album I've heard, beating out Electric Wizard's Dopethrone in terms of faithfulness to the genre itself. It's slow, almost trance-like, and drowned in distortion in a cleaner but just as heavy way. The solos are also really impressive, since they really dip into the psychedelic aspects of Stoner Metal, which are probably my favorite parts of the genre. 

This album, well song, isn't something that can be properly dissected after one listen though. At around the 25 minute mark I had just about enough and wanted to take a break, but by the 45 minute mark the song had reeled me back in somehow, which is pretty impressive. However I can't give it a very high score due to the sheer monotony of the composition and especially the monotony of the vocals, but this sits directly below Dopethrone in terms of Stoner Metal for me, and I can see it climbing even higher if I spend time giving it a few more spins. 

4/5

I find this one a very difficult proposition to be honest. Neither record have made a particularly big impression on my life despite the fact that I find them both to be pretty enjoyable. Witchfinder General have the advantage in the riffs department of course however they do sound like a poor man's Black Sabbath most of the time. I love the challenging early 70’s progressive & psychedelic rock elements in Pagan Altar's sound as well as the more epic feel. The more expansive musicianship (particularly the guitar work of Alan Jones) gives Pagan Altar an edge over the much sloppier Witchfinder General sound too but interestingly it's the repetitive vocals on "Pagan Altar" that I struggle with rather than Zeeb's on "Death Penalty". Terry Jones sometimes sounds like he’s just singing the same phrase over & over again.

I think "Death Penalty" is the more consistent record however it doesn't have quite as many highlights as "Pagan Altar". Some of the remaining Pagan Altar material lacks the hooks that "Death Penalty" has though & the songs sometimes have a tendency to go past without leaving much of an impression even though I generally like what I’m hearing. The doomier moments on "Pagan Altar" are amazing for the time but there really isn’t a song which fully harnesses that sound without diluting it with more bouncy up-tempo material which is a real shame in my opinion. So I'm gonna go with "Death Penalty" by the barest of margins. Mainly due to the Pagan Altar record finishing with a nearly nine minute track that I find to be a bit disappointing.

Death Penalty  1 - Pagan Altar 1

I remember randomly checking Panopticon out without knowing what it was or why it is such an important album and just glazing over it with a resounding "Meh, it's okay I guess". Now that I'm a bit more acquainted with atmospheric sludge/post-metal I think this is an extremely beautiful record but I still don't necessarily find it that...interesting. The type of progressive and atmospheric songwriting is top notch and obviously shows how it influenced so many other bands like Saxy mentioned, Cult of Luna being the biggest one for me. However I can't find many other strong opinions about this record past it sounds pretty and being incredibly written and accessible stuff that still dips its toes into Metal enough to please both ends of the spectrum. I think bands like Cult of Luna as well as Agalloch took this type of formula and created, at least to me, much more interesting sounding music than Isis did with Panopticon. I still rated it highly because it's still a fantastic album but not necessarily better than the later projects it ended up influencing. 

4/5

I...didn't get anything out of this. It's definitely one of the more interesting Drone experiences I've heard, but it just went one in ear and out the other. Need to revisit it, since I can tell there's something cool in here that I must have missed. Since I listened to this a week or so ago I can't really give anything more than that, it was that forgettable to me. 

I finally got around to giving "Wildhoney" a revisit over the last couple of days & I have to say that I still fucking love it. It's just so classy & may be my favourite gothic metal release overall. I'd actually suggest that less the half of the runtime is actually metal with a variety of interesting influences (The Cure, Dead Can Dance, Pink Floyd, etc.) being utilized to create something genuinely original & thoroughly captivating. The guitar solos are the clear highlight. That lead tone is utterly sensational & the execution is quite stunning too.

4.5/5

Echoing Sonny's sentiments of 2019, here's 10 from me:

1. Inter Arma – Sulphur English

2. Cult of Luna – A Dawn to Fear 

3. Runemagick – Into Desolate Realms

4. Weeping Sores – False Confession 

5. Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard – Yn Ol I Annwn 

6. Troll – Legend Master 

7. Esoteric – A Pyrrhic Existence 

8. Lord Vicar – The Black Powder 

9. Waste of Space Orchestra – Syntheosis 

10. Asphodelus – Stygian Dreams

I think the appreciation of this EP (and Paul Chain as a whole) really depends on how you approach him. I look on this as an early-ish doom metal demo and Mr. Chain himself as an innovative ingenue who's ideas sometimes outreach his abilities to deliver them. Personally I love this record, Chain's vision of the early doom sound, particularly of Witchfinder General and Pentagram, expanded on with all manner of synths and effects has the hallmark of a true mad genius reaching for the stars. The lo-fi production quality and his sometime questionable vocal performance, coupled with his killer riffs,  only increase the charm of this record for me. Then again, I have always been a sucker for lo-fi demos and feeling over technicality, but if your taste tends more to well-produced and technically adept metal, then this probably isn't going to be the record for you. Personally, I was made up that Daniel chose this as the first feature release of The Fallen - great choice, my man!

My brother who is usually a rock fan, at one point was listening to gothic metal band Lacuna Coil. I was still in my epic metal taste (power/progressive/folk), and didn't intend to make my music interest go goth. But then I found out that band's female vocalist Cristina Scabbia was in one of my favorite albums at the time, progressive metal opera album The Theory of Everything by Ayreon, and that's what made me interested in Lacuna Coil. Other gothic metal bands that entered my epic metal arsenal included The Gathering, Anathema, and Theatre of Tragedy (including those bands' post-1998 industrial/alt-prog rock material for the sake of completion). After my grand switch to a heavier modern side of metal, I guess you can say I regained my Fallen virginity, then lost it again when I became interested in Tiamat and a few other gothic metal bands later. The gothic part of my metal taste is kinda off-and-on, which is why The Fallen isn't one of my top 3 clans. I'm pretty much more interested in being a metalhead than a goth...