At what point does a band stop striving and just settles into a never-ending victory lap? Take L.A.’s finest Doom Metal group, Saint Vitus, who’ve been at it since the late seventies, and pretty much defined the genre in the eighties. And yet, here we are, in 2019, and a new self-titled album (Season of Mist) from the band is due out soon. It also sees the return of the band’s first lead singer, Scott Reagers, after a twenty-four-year break.

So, is this Saint Vitus reheated? Or just the band entering its English Heritage phase? The truth is, the album is both familiar and yet fresh. The band has not simply gone back to 1984; its sound is now more developed and deep, more mature… That may not sound like a ringing endorsement for the album, were it not for the fact that it is rather good.

True, it lacks the raw, manic, miserable energy of the first Reagers era, but has a more measured and thorough approach. The arrangements are more complex and nuanced. The sections are more varied. Yet, importantly, it still thunders with a sort of miserable, hysterical power. The original Saint Vitus sound, then, yet neither stale nor hobbled with wall-eyed nostalgia.

Tracks like ‘Bloodshed’ and ’12 Years In The Tomb’ scream and moan with rabid desperation. They drag you along with their tempo and drown you with their howling misery. Meanwhile, ‘Hour Glass’ is a dirty, grubby blues number if the blues were heavy as lead and the guitars were a howling vortex of dark psychedelia.

Then there is the penultimate track, ‘Last Breath’, a fitting way to (nearly) end the album, with the magisterial slowness giving way to a gloriously spaced out, foreboding solo, and then a final slow, heavy crawl to oblivion.

True, the spoken word tracks, such as ‘City Park’, have a vaguely creepy vibe about them, but add nothing to the album. Yet apart from this, it’s a consistently good effort, which shows off Saint Vitus as a band with not only a glorious past but quite a future ahead of it too. Perhaps that’s the irony here – it’s Doom Metal, but there’s plenty of life in it…

8 / 10

ALEXANDER HAY