SEMPITERNAL DEATHREIGN — The Spooky Gloom (review)

SEMPITERNAL DEATHREIGN — The Spooky Gloom album cover

Album · 1989 · Death-Doom Metal

3.5/5 · 2020-12-05
siLLy puPPy

Formed in 1986 in the southern city of Gouda in the Netherlands, the band SEMPITERNAL DEATHREIGN was formed by the three cousins Frank Faase (vocals, guitar), Victor van Drie (bass) and Misha Hak (drums) who started out playing extreme thrash metal influenced by early 80s bands like Venom, Exodus, Metallica and Slayer but also took a liking to the Teutonic thrash scene fronted by Destruction, Kreator and Sodom.

Having taken an interest in the slower more plodding styles of doom metal from bands such as Trouble, the band adopted those slower sounds to their style while taking their thrash skills into the nascent recently birthed world of death metal making SEMPITERNAL DEATHREIGN one of the very first death-doom metal bands and the first to release a full album of this style with its 1989 release THE SPOOKY GLOOM. A few other bands were flirting with this style two and did release some demos before though.

This band only existed for four years and disbanded in 1990 leaving this sole album as its mark on the metal history timeline. Unfortunately drummer Misha Hak left before this album was recorded and the band was reduced to a duo but session musician Remo van Arnhem sat in to contribute the percussion parts. Van Drie also adds a few barely audible piano parts here and there but basically this album featured a mix of rampant death metal bombast which alternated with slower plodding doom metal motifs.

The album featured six tracks with a running time of 35 plus minutes and featured the earliest example of lengthy sprawling doom metal tracks with “Devastating Empire Towards Humanity” which was just shy of the eleven mark, a playing time which was still somewhat rare for metal but with Metallica’s “And Justice For All” opening the doors for lengthier metal tracks, by the end of the 80s it was becoming more acceptable to experiment with such drawn out composiitons.

While considered among the first death-doom metal acts, unfortunately the quality of THE SPOOKY GLOOM didn’t result in the best the sub-genre has to offer with many more skilled bands such as diSEMBOWELMENT, My Dying Bride, Katatonia and Evoken taking the stylistic hybrid to more interesting heights in the 90s and beyond but nevertheless SEMPITERNAL DEATHREIGN successfully cross-pollinated the two metal styles fairly successfully.

This was a decent beginning for death-doom but THE SPOOKY GLOOM was marred by a shoddy production job as well as a somewhat amateurish attempt of delivery and although this Dutch band was fairly crafty at alternating the faster death metal moments with slower chugging doom metal, the two styles hadn’t quite gelled together seamlessly yet and the vocal style of Frank Faase (i believe) is a bit goofy reminding me of Exodus’ first singer Paul Baloff who sounded like a tortured clown. Not a bad beginning and well worth the time to check it out but unfortunately in the case of death-doom metal, first doesn’t come close to most interesting.