As the summer months finally arrive, and with the prospect of sunshine-filled holidays (tell me you’re from the UK without saying you’re from the UK) and lazy beach days with ice cold beer and rapidly melting ice-cream literally just around the corner, Arizona Doom trio Goya say fuck all that.
With its cold autumnal title and artwork to match, the band’s brilliantly doomy fourth full-length studio album, In The Dawn Of November (Blues Funeral Recordings) is perfect if you want something to keep you out of the sun for the next few months.
The first of six exquisitely composed examples of the finest Doom Metal, the title cut opens with the slow, sparse and brooding drums of Marcus Bryant before being joined by CJ Sholtis‘s thick, oozing cosmic bass. The riffs soon follow, frontman Jeffrey Owens bringing the Wah pedal and some strikingly powerful vocals.
Opening with a Vincent Price quote from William Castle‘s 1959 horror film House On Haunted Hill, “Cemetary Blues” is another crushing slab of DOOM that sounds like Rob Zombie if he listened to nothing but Black Sabbath and Electric Wizard for a thousand years. The more uptempo “Depressive Episode” sounds like the speakers are about to come completely apart, the four-minute track dominated by distorted fuzz and driving riffs before “Sick Of Your Shit” follows with five minutes of angry Doom that tells you everything you need to know from the title alone.
Introductions featuring wind, rain, and tolling bells never amount to anything happy in the world of Doom Metal, and “I Wanna Be Dead” proves this point in the gloomiest way possible. A funereal opening adds more layers of greyness and claustrophobic depression as it progresses, the whole thing driven onwards by a monolithic Cathedral-esque riff. Owens delivers arguably his best performance on the entire record, and this absolutely sensational twelve-minute epic even finds time for a Geezer Butler-inspired bass solo before “Comes With The Fall” ends the album with murky, oppressive ambience.
Unhurried and ponderous but with an adventurous and psychedelic bluesy edge, “heavy” doesn’t even come close to describing In The Dawn Of November. The production job alone makes it sound like it was recorded in hypergravity, while the three musicians somehow make things even weightier. Sure, a couple of tracks are a little overindulgent here and there, but that’s Doom for you. This is the sound of cities being flattened, mountains collapsing, planets slowly imploding, and entire galaxies colliding.
Buy the album here:
https://marijuana.bandcamp.com/album/in-the-dawn-of-november
9 / 10
GARY ALCOCK
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