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These
are good times for doom metal. If anyone says the
opposite pay no attention. Or just slap them in the
face. Us underground music lovers love our pessimism a
little too much. Every pore of the world seems to be
spewing its own breed of doomsters these days, and
whether these mopey people lean to funeral dirges,
stoner hazes, psychedelic matters or else, it’s of
little importance. What matters is that the world’s
doom supply will experience no shortage in the upcoming
days. Good news for our pockets, because supply is so
abundant the price of doom shall remain low.
Now we have a Finnish quintet named Herem
and they play just my kind of doom. Herem sounds pure. They
adhere to the most classic definition of doom metal; their music
is slow, it drags, it is heavy, and there is not one iota of
happiness, sun or shine in their horizons. Pulsa diNura
(Aramaic for ‘lashes of fire’ and a
kabbalistic
ceremony in which the angels of destruction are invoked to block
heavenly forgiveness of the subject’s sins, causing all the
curses named in the Bible to befall him resulting in his death.
Thanks Wikipedia!) ain’t suicidal doom, or funeral doom by any
means, but in several levels they remind me of ultra slow bands
like the underrated Graves at Sea. We would just have to take
the crust off the latter and we’d be in the ballpark.
On top of
that Herem has two great things going for them; front-woman Valendis
Suomalainen is one of the best vocalist I’ve heard in ages. She
makes Arch Enemy’s Angela Gossow sound like Donald Duck. I ain’t
kidding. Her approach is not one developed one drunken night
while hanging at a dank basement. Valendis sounds like she’s
gathered demons and feels like conjuring them all at once. She
is deep and cavernous, but also cold, frosty, ghostly and
phantasmagoric. Whatever the song calls for, she’s got the
angle. The second thing Herem has going for them is the
guitars. Yeah, for the most part the Laitinen and Ellison tandem
dish out blunt doom riffs, but in every song they manage to add
some melodic groovy solos, at times at once, giving the somber
nature of Herem’s music an air of classic metal maturity rarely
seen and, often purposely avoided, in the doom scene. Good
stuff.
Official Site
MySpace |
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