Review Summary: One of the most abysmal creations ever shat out upon the music world.
Drone is very much meant to stir up feelings of emptiness and despair. How can't it? When you have a genre that focuses on ridiculously long songs that consist mainly of atonal humming, emptiness will surely be brought up (mainly in terms of criticizing the music, which many people deride for being just that: empty). There are bands however that make this kind of music into a true art form, such as Sun O))), whose music incorporates orchestral, dark ambient, and doom metal influences. Then there's an entity like DoomThrone. The sole member of this band keeps his identity secret, and that is most definitely a good thing. DoomThrone's sole release, Skeleton Veiled in Flesh, is the worst kind of boring. It is repressively boring while also seeming to be actively trying to be terrible.
There are only two tracks on this EP, the title track and a cover track entitled "Dance of the Banshee", which was apparently done by a band called Cemetery in the early 1990s. Both songs are exactly the same. Same tempo, same droning, same vocals, same drums, same everything. Both songs, in typical drone fashion, are ridiculously slow and long, with both songs nearing the ten minute mark. There's a different feeling I get though when listening to these two songs. Unlike a band like the previously mentioned Sun O))), where I am mesmerized and drawn in by the compositions Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson create, I am instead bored not only to tears, not only to sleep, but almost to brain death by how plodding, slow, and BORING these two songs are. Both contain the same typical atonal buzzing sound heard in drone music, but the piss poor production makes these hums sound even more bland and repetitive than normal drone music.
The key thing about Skeleton Veiled in Flesh though to remember when listening to it is that it is apparently blackened doom metal. The only thing blackened about this album is the vocals, and even that's pushing it. The vocalist (whom I also assume was the sole creator of this pile of lizard feces) has no name, so I will refer to him as Frog Throat. Frog Throat's vocals sound just like that: as though a frog were lodged in his throat. He also sounds like he has multiple blunt objects inserted into his ass and he is attempting to defecate them out while recording his vocals. He is unintelligible, unlistenable, uninspired, and when combined with the horrendous moaning of what sounds like a very out of tune violin, very obviously programmed drums, production that sounds like Frog Throat mixed this album on Windows Movie Maker, it makes for an unmitigated disaster of a "metal" release.
The lyrics are horrendously cliche and uninspired. Both songs are about death and what the song's narrator feels like in the situation he's in. Frog Throat is a terrible lyricist, with the lyrics to the title track making almost zero sense whatsoever. If the narrator were merely a skeleton with flesh on it, wouldn't that make it alive? Later in the song the skeleton says that "I am a man". But skeletons have no gender of their own, so how could merely a skeleton (in flesh mind you. Flesh that we don't know the gender of ) call itself a man if it has no gender characteristics to speak of? The lyrics to "Dancing with the Banshee" are only slightly better, but it must be remembered that that song is not a DoomThrone original. Frog Throat didn't write those lyrics. Not to mention that the title track is the only DoomThrone original I know of. The only two DoomThrone songs known to exist are the aforementioned Cemetery cover as well as a cover of Bathory's "13 Candles". Thankfully I've never heard it, but Quorthon must be doing cartwheels in his grave after thinking about how Frog Throat bastardized his creation.
DoomThrone's "Skeleton Veiled in Flesh" give Ov Hell's "The Underworld Regime" a run for its money as the most idiotically boring album I personally have ever listened to. All the things mentioned above, the poorly programmed drums, the garbage production quality, the abysmal vocals from Frog Throat, the horrifically bad lyrics, and the complete and utter lack of anything new make Skeleton Veiled in Flesh a true snooze fest of unknown proportions. Not even the EP cover had any effort put into it. Sadly though, the cover, what with it's resemblance to Microsoft Word clip art and its use of the completely overused images of the inverted crucifix and the Old English font, is the most interesting thing about this EP. And when the cover art is more impressive than the music, and the cover art is still total schlock along with the rest of the EP, there is no salvaging your band.
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