Swelling organs, gothic riffing, gallons of red wine and frightening tales of sinisterness and sickness…
Divulged by Trollzorn on 27 May 2016 and hearkened to by Jason “I’m all ears” Guest
Well, this is far from what I expected. “Horror doom metal” is not really a genre tag that would usually appeal, but when a disc drops through your door and there’s a gap in the schedule, what’s to lose? “Born from the depths of the bloody oceans of hell and shaped by the most disturbing trash horror movies”, apparently German duo Vampyromorpha play “spaced out Adult Oriented Doom Metal drenched in gallons of red wine and frightening tales of sinisterness and sickness.” Okay. So they’re a doom / horror version of Powerwolf are they? Well, not quite, but not far off. On the one side of things we’ve got the usual suspects of doom – Pentagram, Candlemass, Witchfinder General and the like – and on the other we have The Sisters of Mercy, Killing Joke, and The Damned. Intriguing.
Whether the band are monstering their way through the mighty ‘Häxanhammer’, rocking it up with the intoxicating ‘Bacchus’, drenching us with dread in the semi-danceable ‘Satan’s Palace’, or gothing it up with ‘Peine Forte et Dure’, Fiendish Tales of Doom bears all the bombast and grandeur that their joyful genre tag denotes. The songs are heavy and catchy, immediately so, and the duo’s performances are outstanding. While multi-instrumentalist Nemes Black lays down a solid foundation and paints a darkly contoured and richly textured soundscape, Jim Grant’s vocals bear the power and the perversity that the songs need and his Hammond organ swells with a blood-chilling terror that floats ghost-like through the album’s dense and spookily-charged atmosphere. Stick a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘I’m So Afraid’ on the end and you’ve got a pretty good album. Yep, Peter Steele would be proud.
7 out of 10
Track list:
- Deliver Us from the Good
- Häxanhammer
- Metuschelach Life Cycle
- Satan’s Palace
- Bacchus
- Peine Forte et Dure
- I’m So Afraid (Fleetwood Mac)
