BRITON RITES — For Mircalla (review)

BRITON RITES — For Mircalla album cover Album · 2010 · Doom Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Warthur
Take a look at the cover of Briton Rites' sole album (so far), and you get a pretty good idea of where the band are coming from. Satanic rites, vampires, boobies, and one of those elaborate Pentagrams from the fake, cheesy version of the Necronomicon that got everywhere in the 1980s when Avon put it out in paperback (and which got further spread in the metal scene when Morbid Angel drew on it extensively for their imagery)? Yep, we're talking old school here alright!

Specifically, what we are looking at is old school, traditional doom metal, with frontman Phil Swanson having a vocal style very much in the Ozzy tradition and thick, Sabbathy riffs crushingly delivered by Howie Bentley. In terms of subject matter, it's the oft-seen doom metal obsession with classic horror stories which more or less rules the day, with lots of references to H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and with the album bookended by epic tributes to Sheridan Le Fanu's classic vampire novel Carmilla (which, indeed, the album title is also a reference to).

This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a revolutionary album - it doesn't take the traditional doom metal subgenre anywhere which it isn't already intimately familiar with thanks to the work of the likes of Electric Wizard, Candlemass, or for that matter genre godfathers Black Sabbath themselves. But for those who like this sort of thing - and I include myself in that - this is an excellently realised take on the style, and one which makes me dearly hope that we'll see more from Briton Rites in the future.
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