Doom metal is a pretty hard genre to pin-point now a days, with the dragging notes now becoming faster with the addition of Sludge-metal, or the completely and utterly obliteration of an actual rhythm when mixed with Drone, it’s pretty hard to find what true Doom metal is now-a-days,
Eight Hands For Kali (EHFK) were a Spanish Doom-Metal band, the put out a 2 records in their whole career the first one being the one we’re about to dive into
Mount Meru
Now the atmosphere is truly heavy, it sometimes feels like you’re being squeezed from every single direction beneath the ocean, taking a dive into the Marianas trench with nothing but your Speedos on could very well feel the same as this, the music is tight, beefy and heavy, the adding of spoken skits in some of the songs (
Skeleton Horse) give this a pretty different twist to what most bands on the scene are used to do.
The drumming is tight, pounding away at the skins with such a nice flow to it, the occasional (if ever) fast change does exist but they are few and far between each other.
However you may be wondering why I haven’t even mentioned the vocals. Or lyrics for that matter?;
Well the truth is, the vocalist isn’t superb, he doesn’t scream too often and when he does he does it in such way that it sounds more like shouting than actual screaming, this however isn’t a drawback for I see it as the reason which I can refer to this as a real doom metal album, you see most of Doom now a days has been mixed with black metal in ways that it’s got its head so far up his bum you don’t even know where one ends and the other begins, this is not the case in this album, they poses the doom sound in a unadulterated way, crisp, clean singing, lyrics perfectly understandable, coped with some heavy as hell musicality is all you’ll find here.
Unfortunately, that’s still not enough to be this record saving grace, most of the musicality is pretty average for today’s standard, not even the pretty sweet instrumental S/T track can’t save it from everything else being just
okay.
In essence Mount Meru is a pretty good Doom album (the way the vocalist tackles the lyrics on Apocalypse Love Hypnotized is truly a breath of fresh air), but one which you can’t really spend a lot of time with before it getting dull, and with songs rather short for the genre (its only 27 minutes long)
It comes and goes before you can tell it was here, and I’m still not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.
