At the tail end of 2021, a new stoner band appeared over the musical horizon. Blue Heron were incredibly heavy, and yet conveyed broad atmospheres within their world of darkness. It was clear from their two track debut that they weren’t just another sludgy doom and stoner vehicle hacking out weighty riffs.
Tag Archives: doom metal
WEIRD TALES – Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die EP
At the beginning of 2021, Polish doom metal band Weird Tales released an EP of material based around classic blues numbers. Their heaviness was without question; their lack of compromise even more so. Unfortunately, the end results were not only as scary as hell, but actually insulting to the legacies of the Delta blues pioneers. Good or bad – or in this case, possibly awful – they definitely made an impression.
DAXMA – Unmarked Boxes
With their 2019 EP ‘Ruins Upon Ruins’, Daxma really put themselves on the map in terms of inventive metal. Presenting just two tracks across a sprawling twenty one minutes, the release weaved a musical tapestry that took a doomy core and dressed it with strong gothic and post metal undertones, allowing Jessica T’s haunting vocal style to really work its dark magic. On the self-penned ‘Minima Moralia’, the band showed a real gift for a sprawling arrangement, and on an unexpected cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Landslide’ – redressed as a gothic post metal tour de force, pulled across ten unmerciful minutes – they demonstrated a sense of fearlessness that seemed almost unparalleled. As far as covers go, it really shouldn’t have worked, but the fact that it did, more than proved that sheer audacity can pay off if a band has the right combination of talent and self belief.
EMBR – 1021 EP
On their debut album ‘1823’, US metal band EMBR wasted no time in introducing their talents with a heavy riff. Across its seven songs, there were strong callbacks to doom and sludge greats like Crowbar jostling with flourishes that suggested a love of the darker side of the grunge and goth movements. Unlike so many other similar releases was a strong melodic core, helped no end by some great vocal performances from Crystal Bigelow. The band closed the year with a surprise covers EP, ‘Idolatory’, which further showcased their natural abilities for heavy sounds, as well as a love for some of Seattle’s finest exports. After that release, there was no doubt that this would be a band to watch out for in the future.
DEATH ON FIRE – Six Foot Box EP
Indiana death metal/extreme metal band Death On Fire cover a wide musical ground on the follow up to their 2020 long player ‘Ghost Songs’. The ‘Six Foot Box’ EP only features three tracks, but by taking elements of old school thrash metal, a pinch of black metal coldness and broad strokes of doom, the material almost feels as if it crams in a full album’s worth of ideas into a little under fifteen minutes.