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Beauty is complicated.  It has intricacies that aren't (and shouldn't be) as obvious at first glance as they appear to be over time and experience.  Beauty can also be scary. Knowing that there are darker depths behind what on the surface appears to be attractive, elegant or graceful is all part of the allure in reality. To underline this point Spectral Lore choose in the midst of the ambient respite of track 2 "The Veiled Garden" to unleash the most unholy of agonising BM shrieks I have heard in a long while.  It's impact is harrowing, in a split second a wave of blackest, furious emotion washes over you and erases all memory of the calm that precedes it.  This is the beauty of "III", this is its complicated and intricate nature laid bare.  There is no middle ground on this record, there is no single direction or style being exhibited, it's an album of powerful music full of raw energy and structured like some architectural behemoth that has been

Taking "Black Masses" at face value as a tame throng of occult ridden doom, you could be wondering exactly where Electric Wizard could take us on their next opus?  The fact is nobody has sat waiting for this record expecting any massive shift in style, or change of pace or sound, so it could be argued that Electric Wizard's task is made easy by the simple act of working within the restrictions of the very genre in which they sit. So where have the group taken us this time?  How do you follow up a solid yet mediocre slab of doom like "Black Masses"?  Simply put you just ramp up the darkness, ramp up the evil and down tune a bit more.  To take your slow and heavy. established sound and find renewed fire in you belly to take it onto another level all together takes effort and thought and that is obvious in abundance on "Time To Die". As album opener "Incense For The Damned" begins it's obvious from the off that the darkness that seeps fr

Profound Lore Records is a bastion of doom metal.  For a whole catalogue of the slow and heavy you could waste an entire weekend on their bandcamp page alone.  Newly added to the list is the latest release from Witch Mountain , those near veterans of female fronted occult doom metal. Anyone with eyes and ears will know that Uta Plotkin will no longer be fronting the band with her amazing vocal capabilities so this release is somewhat of a land mark in the career of Witch Mountain .  Now to be clear here, in recent years female fronted occult rock/doom has become a flood of pretenders trying to be retro or cvlt and as a result fans have had to wade through (at times tread water) to get through to some of the more obvious quality available from the genre.   Witch Mountain have been at this for 7 years now and it shows.  That perfect blend of Uta's hauntingly beautiful vocals combined with the equally powerful lead work of Rob Wrong has never sounded so vibrant and poign