Review Summary: I don't know if I started drinking 'cause my wife left me or my wife left me 'cause I started drinking, but fuck it anyway.
Hangman's Chair is a stoner/doom metal band from France but their brand of stoner is more depressive than most of the other bands in the genre. While most bands sing about what fun it is to get high or some crappy low budget horror movies or stupid occult rituals, Hangman's Chair sing about self-loathing and suicidal tendencies of addiction.
(A Lament for...) The Addicts is the debut album of this band. While they refined their sound more in their later albums, this one demonstrates a rawer and more faster sound from the Frenchmen. Julien Rour Chanut and Co. is more interested in rocking out than getting their doom on in this album. But it doesn't mean that there's a lack of doom metal riffs here. There's enough slow and heavy doom metal riffs to keep the doomsters satisfied. These riffs are quite catchy and the guitars also incorporate a lot of melody throughout the album. There's also instrumental psychedelic jams in most of the songs which fit very well within the context of the songs. The bass can be heard best during the slower, doomier parts and they sound typically distorted and noisy. They add to the heaviness and dynamic of the songs. Drumming is solid with enough variation. They allow the songs to flow from one section to another effortlessly.
Keo Nackphouminh is the vocalist in this album. This is his only full length album with the band. He sounds exactly how he is supposed to be: drunk and dying. His drunken voice has a sense of irony in it which fits well with the relatively faster composition of the band. He also adds a lot of melody in his drunken stupor and manages to sound catchy all the time. There are a lot of sudden tempo changes in the songs which remind me a little of Acid Bath. But unlike Dax Riggs, Keo only uses clean vocals but he is still able to pull off both faster and slower sections with ease.
The lyrics are sometimes poetic like in the acoustic ballad The Snow Is Back in Town and sometimes just blunt like in I'm Proud to Destroy Myself. They deal heavily with alcoholism and express a lack of self-worth. A perennial yearning for death is constant throughout the album. This album demonstrates a man's lonely journey from alcoholism to death starting with the song Sad but Drunk and ending with the epic ten minutes closer White Fits Me Well. There are also a couple of instrumentals which don't add much too the album. Some samples have also been used but I can't recognise them where they are from.
I once asked a blue eyed Russian cam whore, "what's your hobby?" and she replied, "alcoholism". I wished she left her current job and became a bartender in my neighbourhood so I could see her everyday but that's just a stupid fantasy. However, Hangman's Chair doesn't offer any kind of hope in this album. There's no silver lining here. If you are too lonely, chances are you are just gonna drink yourself to death. But at least you'll have this album to ease the process and increase the quality of your suffering.
