Review by Sonny for Capilla Ardiente - Where Gods Live and Men Die (2024)

Capilla Ardiente are a five piece from Santiago, Chile and features a couple of members of doom crew, Procession, along with vocalist, Felipe Plaza Kutzbach, of Deströyer 666, who also provided vocals for this years "Ancient Doom Metal" album from legendary russian epic doomers, Scald. They play epic doom metal, and I mean with an emphasis on the EPIC. Only one of the four tracks on offer here clock in at less than ten minutes and musically and aesthetically they have as much in common with power metal as they do doom. Sure, the riffs are pure epic doom metal, but the overwrought and histrionic vocals, the shred-like guitar solos and the melodramatic songwriting all scream power metal to me. I can hear where they have clearly taken influence from the likes of Rich Walker's Solstice or Solitude Aeternus, in fact Kutzbach has toured with Solstice as the band's live vocalist on a couple of occasions, but where the great epic doom acts succeed is that they keep the inbuilt pompousness and excess of epic metal under control and exercise restraint when utilising the more overblown aspects of the genre, whereas here the chileans give free rein to all the most bombastic elements of their sound. Make comparison, for example, between Felipe Plaza Kutzbach's performance here compared to that he turned in for "Ancient Doom Metal" and I think that most people would agree his performance is more OTT and less controlled than that he gave on the Scald album. sounding eminently more like a power metal singer than a doom metal vocalist. For my money, epic doom is best when built around the aesthetic of a mournful and sombre yearning for lost glories, whereas "Where Gods Live and Men Die" feels more like power metal's grandiose and bombastic celebration of hegemony.

This certainly isn't a bad record by any means, when they get it right, such as with the hugely mournful riffs and more reflective vocals of "Now Here. Nowhere." it is actually very good, but too often it emphasises the epic side of the genre at the expense of the doom-laden and that will always illicit are more negative response from me. Performance-wise, the guys are technically very good and the production is nice and meaty, occasionally allowing the more doomy moments to shine through. The songwriting is quite good, although they go for a bit more complexity than is the norm for the genre, giving the individual tracks somewhat of a progressive feeling. Undoubtedly, it is a more memorable affair than the previous album with some very effective riffs, but its overly bombastic approach leaves me unlikely to be returning to it too often in the future I think. Still, if your tolerance for this more overblown approach is higher than mine, then there may well be plenty of meat for you to get your teeth into here but for me it's all a bit too much.