Doom tends to be somewhat formulaic, it’s part of its gloomy charm. To be appreciated fully it’s generally best to be played at skeleton shaking volume. As a whole the genre isn’t particularly suited for records unless you happen to have a wall of cabinets in your house raring and ready to give your neighbours tinnitus. Ommadon’s eponymously titled album on Dry Cough Records follows that doom formula very well. Fleshed out with production from Billy Anderson meaning that the tone is excellent throughout both tracks.
The problem sets in somewhat with the fact that as it’s a two-piece instrumental doom act, they’ve kind of played themselves into a corner. What they do is good, but there’s not really all that much which they can do to make it stand out from the many other doom bands playing the same standard ‘bumbum bumbum BAAAM’ doom riff.
By foregoing vocals, the focus goes entirely onto the music to carry the emotion of the piece and unfortunately no matter how good the tone or the performance the standard hit the guitar/drums, wait, repeat formula just lacks an emotional depth after hearing it repeated for half an hour.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t have merit, with the tone and competency I would imagine this really comes into its own live, with the benefit of much higher volume, a mesmerised audience filling a small sweaty venue on a dreek day. Then it would have relevance and connect with the listener.
However, on record there’s nothing really hear which separates it from any other doom band I’ve heard. What it does is competent, with a great tone. However, there’s little to make it stand out from the crowd.
6.0/10
RICH PRICE
