siLLy puPPy
Lured in by the strange and garlanded goat on the painting titled “Witches' Sabbath” by Francisco Goya which adorns the album cover, REVEREND BIZARRE continues the thrills and chills of dramatic traditional doom metal following in the footsteps of Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus and Pentagram. Their strategy is simple. Keep it slow, keep a fuzzed out hypnotic guitar tone and only speed things up occasionally to break the spell only long enough to take you to the next hypnotizing and atmospheric track.
What really works for me with this depressive sonicscape of gloom and doom is the brilliant dramatic vocal preaching of Magister Albert Witchfinder and his distorted low frequencies with the slow burning, behemoth guitar riffage of Peter Vicar. The creeping death slowness drumming of Earl Of Void completes this Unholy Trinity (what they called themselves) delivering some of the most intense impending dreadful sounding doom metal that I can think of.
Overall, this is a really wicked sound that I love but I think that the album would have been better off with a shorter running track. By the time I get to the sprawling 21:09 minute closer “Cirith Ungol” I feel sufficiently doom and gloomed out and that track doesn't add any new ideas to the otherwise sufficiently long album. That said, this is a great album and despite the length I really dig the sound and feel of the whole thing.