Just a quick note to say I am enjoying – if “enjoy” is an appropriate word – the Altars of Grief album, Iris. Google, and the band itself, describes its music as blackened doom! I get the doom, but not the blackened aspect. There are fast drums, but not really monotonous blastbeats. The prevailing mood, I would say, is one of mournful doom.
Mournful doom! There’s a category for the Grammies, hey. Your music in this subgenre would be slow, heavy, but most of all very sad. But mournful more than merely sad. It’s like the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in “the Weeping Song”:
Father, why are all the children weeping?
They are merely crying son
O, are they merely crying, father?
Yes, true weeping is yet to come
I would imagine that such a style of music is not everyone’s cup of tea. However, while walking in the Pennines yesterday in the gloaming, fingers freezing as a heavy fog descended, I found there are few more appropriate soundtracks to such a walk.
The guitars are heavy and melodic, and the vocals a mix of deathy bellows and very heroic melodic fare. It’s not the kind of thing you’d listen to every day, unless you were of a very robust constitution, but it’s edifying once in a while.
throughsilver in blog 