I don’t know if there is a word which means the exact opposite of “prolific”, but if there is it probably appears next to pictures of Pagan Altar a lot. Not everyone can be Merzbow, but four albums in forty years is definitely on the opposite extreme, especially when one of them is actually a demo reissued twenty years later. The Room Of Shadows (Temple Of Mystery) itself has taken fifteen years to emerge, and due to the tragic death of vocalist Terry Jones will certainly be their last. To have built such an untouchable reputation as bastions of their genre with such a small amount of recorded music is strong testimony to just how good they are.
The label most commonly associated with Pagan Altar is Doom, but if you associate it with crushingly slow, densely heavy music you may be surprised. Pagan Altar’s roots are planted firmly in the NWOBHM and classic British Rock, Blues and Folk – smokey licks and solos coiling languidly around muscular but melodic riffing and Jones’ strangely beautiful vocals, triumphant and wounded in equal measure. The DOOM comes not from artificial heaviness but from the tone, a feeling of genuine mystery and otherness, the aura of misty forests and open graves that’s present throughout these seven perfectly crafted songs.
It would be easy to think of The Room Of Shadows as a throw-back or a time-capsule – you certainly won’t hear any references that you’ll need to go beyond the mid-Seventies to explain – but that would be missing the very real vitality and presence of the music. Despite their glacial recording rate, Pagan Altar have been doing what they do for so long that their understanding of this music almost seems innate, both songwriting and playing achieving what it sets out to with complete efficiency.
Unmarred by neither the tragedy of its circumstance nor the length of time passed in releasing it, The Room Of Shadows is both the perfect farewell to one of the most important bands of their generation and a reminder that Metal does not have to chase extremes to be heavy.
8.0/10
RICHIE HR