Album of the Month time again and for November the winner was Dream Unending’s second full length Song of Salvation. The usual gang of suspects, along with some new blood, join in along with our main man on the mic Buke leading the charge. The gang spends time covering how this album compares to their last and why this one somersaults over their last effort. Elsewhere, the gang spends a good portion of the runtime gushing over everything else they listened to since they last spoke. That and the usual banter back and forth on literally anything and everything.
In other words, just another episode of the Nine Circles Audio Thing.
Doom metal bands, creatively at least, seem to have backed themselves into a corner. Or in this case, smoked themselves into a corner. In the same way post rock calcified into a genre of peaks and crescendos, doom metal became a genre associated with weed. There are doom metal bands that don’t pray at the altar of the leaf, like Khemmis and Pallbearer. Still at this point for a segment of metal fans, the phrase doom metal typically conjures images of voluminous pillars of smoke and green leaves. However, on Forgotten Mansion, Witchfinder mostly veer away from these tropes. Mostly, I say.
Extreme metal has an orthodoxy problem. I find it most present in black metal, where adherence to the extremely old and cold ways is something celebrated instead of viewed as redundant and wholly unnecessary (laughably so in a genre as much about elitism and shrugging off of herd mentality as black metal oft claims to be). Yet all stripes of metal have their moments of complacency, of clinging to the path of least resistance, even death metal. It’s adherence to form is not nearly as strictly held as black metal, but death metal by and large, I find, is content to be death metal; unchanged and unbothered by change. Every now and then you get an album like Ulcerate’s Stare Into Death and Be Still that radically shakes up the genre and opens up new possibilities, but those albums are few and far in between, and honestly, it’s mostly fine; I find an OK death metal album a lot more enjoyable to listen to than an OK black metal album. But the older I get, and the longer I involve myself in the world of extreme metal, the more of those special, groundbreaking albums I hear, and the more I long to focus my time and patience listening to the music that truly speaks to me. Black metal has no shortage of genre-defying artists these days, and doom can get suitably weird with it too. So where does that leave death metal you ask? Why, in the capable hands of Dream Unending, and the brand new album Song of Salvation,that’s where.
God knows I love doom, but I would hardly call myself a “doom connoisseur” like some people on this site (I don’t think she’s ever actually called herself that, but you get it). But even so, doom is such a vast genre that, while our tastes in doom overlap some, I don’t think they’re really all that close. Angela’s drawn to psychedelic, stoner and generally very ethereal doom, where I like the kind of doom that feels like being hit in the cerebellum with a wrecking ball, which is why I love Conan and their new album Evidence of Immortality.
The UK’s Conan are the heaviest doom metal band on the planet right now. Full stop and let that sink in. If their previous four albums haven’t convinced, turn your attention to their fifth and newest offering Evidence of Immortality. Their brand of doom is the embodiment of Mad Max level of destruction set low and slow and tuned down to the gates of Hell and this album just puts an exclamation mark on that statement. Buke sat down with guitarist and vocalist Jon Davis for a wide ranging discussion surrounding the album, the band, and much more. We now bring you this conversation in its entirety so grab your beverage of choice, a seat, and enjoy.
Nine Circles 