VALE OF AMONITION — Those of Tartarean Ancestry (review)

VALE OF AMONITION — Those of Tartarean Ancestry album cover

Album · 2017 · Doom Metal

3/5 · 2020-05-28
siLLy puPPy

African metal bands are still completely under the radar in terms of worldwide exposure but the Southern nations such as Botswana and South Africa have been quite prolific in recent years however when it comes to sub-Saharan regions ranging from Senegal all the way to Kenya and Tanzania, there really haven’t been a lot of artists who have gone the metal route. There are exceptions of course and here’s one of them. VALE OF AMONITION is a doom metal anomaly coming from the city of Kampala, Uganda and has been sticking it out since 2009. So far this band has released three EPs and two full-length albums. The first titled “Those of Metal Afar” which came out in 2012 and this sophomore album THOSE OF TARTAREAN ANCESTRY which didn’t emerge until 2017 as a digital release only.

While the lineup has changed over the years, the core members are the duo of Victor Rosewrath aka Vickonomy on lead guitars and vocals along with Solomon Dust who plays rhythm guitars and bass. Walter Warblood was added in 2014 as drummer and has been along for the ride ever since but seems to get credited as a session musician rather than being a full member of the band. Generally speaking Vickonomy crafts the poetic lyrics and Dust crafts the musical accompaniment. The band actually got its start as a fairly standard blues rock band called “Downtown Blues” that borrowed liberally from classic 60s and 70s artists like Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple but once VALE OF AMONITION was formed went for a more avant-garde metal approach but since it’s almost impossible to find a sample to check out i’m not sure how weird it was.

On THOSE OF TARTAREAN ANCESTRY the sound has gone into the direction of doom metal with the most obvious influence coming from the English band My Dying Bride with its long drawn out gloomy doom marches and is especially obvious in Vickonomy’s contemplative lugubrious vocal style that at times is a dead ringer for Aaron Stainthorpe. The music of VALE OF AMONITION follows MDB’s snail-paced march through epic and lumbering tales of lands far away and augmented with intermittent spoken word narrations that recount various aspects of the tale at hand. TARTAREAN refers to the deep abyss in Greek mythology that was used as a dungeon of torment and suffering for the wicked and as the prison for the Titans. The music generally offers an epic sprawling procession and matches these gloomy themes quite well.

While doom metal is almost unheard of in Africa, VALE OF AMONITION carries it off quite well however this music is a bit too derivative from the original sources for my liking. The My Dying Bride influences are too much in the forefront with the same time signatures of the drawn out guitar riffs and the atmospheric claustrophobia that oozes out of the cracks. Vocally it falls way to close to a lost My Dying Bride album at least in the singing department. Also the drumming sounds a bit lackadaisical and the album drags on for too long as it lacks enough variety and climactic justification to linger on for so long. Oh and the album takes way to long to get to the metal parts. On the positive side of things there are many moments with strange guitar tricks and a few off-kilter vocalized extras and i would’ve loved to hear more of these variations strewn about the album but it feels that VALE was playing things a bit too safe with deviating from the established orthodoxies of doom metal. Overall not a bad album but not as awesome as i was hoping for. Ugandan doom metal may not be common but i can see that these guys have potential if they allow a bit more creativity to flourish.