Getting Started with Doom Metal (1997-2005)

The Albums That Carry the Torch for the Slowest Metal Known to Man

May 17, 2009

With the turn of the millennium came an even slower, groovier brand of doom metal whose sound rolls through speakers like a slow motion lava-flow.

The harrowing funeral, death, and stoner doom that was prominent in the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s gave way to a wide variety of doom to follow. A few things remained true, regardless: high volumes, long dirges, and a focus on heaviness.

These five albums helped propel the doom metal genre into the new millennium and beyond. One after another these albums almost seem to be daring the next to be even slower and more tortured than what came before them. Luckily for any fan of doom, they are – so far – succeeding magnificently.

Built around a spacey, dreary British attitude and a penchant for abrasion, Electric Wizard’s music stomps around interplanetary pathways with textured riffs and solos that on whimsical paranoia. Their distinct, chunky guitar and bass tone takes the evil note of the blues scale and turns it into a mantra, churning out groove after groove of amplifier worship.

In what would come to be their final album (rereleased years later as Dopesmoker, with an extra eleven minutes), Sleep took two years to blow a six-figure advance on marijuana. With what little remained, they recorded this single fifty-two-minute journey to the Weedian Nazareth. The song almost has to force itself out of the speakers it’s traveling with such a restrained level of inertia.

A listener shouldn’t be fooled by opening track and two minute ambient guitar interplay “Dusk.” Trouble is brewing in the not-so-distant distance, and it hits immediately within the first second of “Doom’s Bride.” Showing dynamics that only made the heavy parts that much heavier, the dull, loud thuds the band makes create an atmosphere of aggression that matches the band’s name. With songs this heavy, heaven won’t be the only thing turned to ash: everything will.

Chords sustain for minutes at a time and turn into mere vibrations on this debut by Chicago drone-doom masters Buried at Sea. Broken into three eleven-plus-minute movements, the songs cascade into one another in washes of feedback and tortured screams. With music so destructive, it’s not surprising that the band only lasted for this full-length, a demo, and a handful of singles.

Though it follows the same format as their other albums, opening track “Quantum Mystic” punches and jives in an odd time, showing the band at both their most propelling and the twenty-one-minute “The Mental Tyrant” showcases both the beautiful, dissonant chords and oppressively slow tempos YOB is known for.

Future Doom

Though the bands on this list have created, arguably, the doomiest, heaviest music known to humankind, there’s good reason to suspect that they will be outdone. Just as they have outdone their predecessors, it would be wise for a listener to look to bands like Zozobra and Ramesses to take doom to a new, unexpected level.

The copyright of the article Getting Started with Doom Metal (1997-2005) in Rock Music is owned by Ryan Werner. Permission to republish Getting Started with Doom Metal (1997-2005) in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.