Time Signature
In the name of rock 'n' roll...
Genre: traditional doom metal
It's heavy. It's dense. It's repetitive. It's old-fashioned. It's Swedish. It's Count Raven. It's f*cking great.
When I was in the underground thrash metal band, Erector, I listened quite extensively to "Storm Warning", and the other guys in the band used to laugh at it because it was slow, the riffage often simple and the singer had a strange nasal voice. I didn't care, because those were exactly things that I loved about this album. I still love them.
I love this old traditional style of doom metal, and "Storm Warning" is one of my all time favorites. Most of the riffage is simple, perhaps, but very captivating and melancholic. Compared to newer doom metal, the music on this album may not seem slow and heavy, but it is still heavy and doom-ladden. Tracks like "True Revelation", "In the Name of Rock 'n' Roll", and "Within the Garden of Mirrors" are just captivating and soul-torturing, and I love how their main riffs are just constantly repeated.
One of the things that my band mates at the time laughed the most at was Christian Lindersson's strange nasal voice and vocal lines. As it happens, I really love Lindersson's work on this album. His voice may be strange, but it's so very expressive. It has been described as being Ozzy-like, but, to my ears it isn't - Fondelius, who would take over as vocalist after Lindersson joined St. Vitus, sounds much more like Ozzy; needless to say, I like Lindersson better, because he sounds original.
Count Raven have received credit for writing socially conscious texts, which was unusual in most doom metal at the time, which dealt more with either psychological topics like depression and sorrow or horror/fantasy related topics. I do like the lyrical themes of "Storm Warning" although it's weird to hear anti-glam metal lyrics to such a melancholic riff as the main riff of "In the name of Rock 'n' Roll" - on the other hand, anti-glam was extremely metal at the time, and I really like the imagery of the lyrics, and how Lindersson ends up blaming the messed u state-of-affairs in the world on glam metal posers.
This is a doom metal classic. Buy it!