Lord of the Grave

Green Vapour

Written by: EW on 09/05/2013 23:48:18

Hiding their overriding passion for weed about as well as the Pope does for Catholicism, Swiss stoner/doom trio Lord of the Grave just love to smoke, maaaan. Last year's LP "Green Vapour", their second, I think makes this clear from cover and title, but further proof comes in the form of the very first riff which kicks in after 25 seconds of 15-minute opener "Raping Zombies". With a bass sound as weighty as a 30cm doobie and the lethargy of a pothead at 5am, every minute of these 44 is a self-congratulatory attempt at harnessing the power of the distorted riff and crashing cymbals into a cynical attempt at following genre gods Electric Wizard and Sleep, but in reality "Green Vapour" falls a long way short.

On first appearances "Green Vapour" appears to be a competent stoner/doom mash of 5 heaving, slow dirges - and that is exactly what it is, but devoid of any originality or attempts to serve anything new to the genre. Giving homage to the genre is all well and good if done with a degree of panache and enterprise - the High Priest of Saturn LP I have just reviewed does that - but this is to stoner/doom what all those third-rate retro-thrash records of around 2009 were to that scene, albeit with added weed in place of patch jackets and hi-tops. It's not that any of this offends me on a musical level as "Horsepuncher" crashes into life from the foundations of Michael Low's weighty bass sound and Rob Grave's heavily down-tuned guitars in the usual fuzzed out (and here, inconsistently played) manner, while "Mountain Rites" offers riffs here and there that Sleep probably jammed out around their "Dopesmoker" writing sessions but which ultimately never made it onto the record. It is more the lack of ambition that hurts. And quite probably the fact that as a committed doomster of many years I have yet to pull on some ganja (is that how they say it?). So in all likelihoods I was never going to get this.

4

Download: Raping Zombies
For The Fans Of: Sleep, Church of Misery, Bongzilla
Listen: Facebook

Release date: 10.11.2012
The Church Within Records

Related Items | How we score?
Comments
comments powered by Disqus

Legal

© Copyright MMXXIV Rockfreaks.net.