Count Raven - Mammons War (2009)^{Release ID: 15055}

Mammon's War was released fully thirteen years after previous album, Messiah of Confusion, during which time Count Raven had split and reformed a couple of times leaving Dan Fondelius as the only remaining founding member. Luckily for us this was no ill thought out and cynical attempt to relive former glories and resulted in the band's best album in my opinion.
It may be a bit obvious and lazy (albeit correct) to state the fact that this sounds an awful lot like 1980's Ozzy Osbourne and there are several tracks that could be compared to tracks on Ozzy's debut solo effort, Blizzard of Ozz, although without the amazing guitar antics of a Randy Rhoades, obviously. This similarity is apparent from the off with the opener The Poltergeist sounding very much like Steal Away (The Night) and second track The Scream coming on like Mr. Crowley. The album's overall vibe is more doomy than Eighties Ozzy for sure, especially on tracks like The Entity and the crawling, despondent-sounding A Lifetime. Interestingly, bridging these two doom-ridden heavyweights is the synth-driven title track that certainly wouldn't have felt out of place on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and would probably have been preferable to Who Are You.
To Kill A Child sounds like a deeply personal song for Dan Fondelius, describing a father's tough decisions to make about his suffering child, which is followed by the acoustic track To Love, Wherever You Are, the two songs combining to provide the emotional heart of the album. Magic Is... is a return to the vibe of the first couple of tracks and is as much trad metal as doom metal. The subsequent Seven Days is most definitely doom metal though, but is one of the weaker tracks on the album despite featuring the only guitar solo of any substance. The album is closed out by another synth-driven track, Increasing Deserts, that along with the previous track leaves the album with a bit of a weak ending for me. At getting on for seventy minutes, I think the band would have been better advised to give these last two tracks a miss and would have put out a better album because of it. I think in future I'll just eject the CD after Magic Is... and pretend that's the album they meant to make!