Getting Started with Doom Metal (1985-1994)

A Retrospective of the Inception of the Slowest Metal Known to Man

May 17, 2009

Fuzz rumbles full stacks of amplifiers as doom metal shakes the musical earth to simple, loud volumes, creating music that stretches in distance instead of time.

The song “Black Sabbath” got millions of heshers out of bed and into the garage, instrument in hand, and metalheads were posed with a choice right from the inception. Half of them were followers of the ending of the song: an up-tempo chug, a driving rhythm section, and guitar solos to end the world. The other half subscribed to the aesthetic laid down by the first half: slow, evil, and even slower.

Popping on the old 45 of “Kashmir” and feeling the power of the riff is a mighty experience, but sometimes it doesn’t hurt to play it at 33 RPM and get the sense that the band is moving through peanut butter.

The following five albums helped pioneer the doom metal genre, and even though the earliest here appears over fifteen years after that first riff in “Black Sabbath,” the bands deserve a break. With some of the epic doom on these albums, it may have taken fifteen years for even a single note to leave the speaker.

With 1984’s Psalm 9, Trouble became the 1980’s answer to Black Sabbath. On follow-up album The Skull, Trouble continued to utilize the punishing twin-guitar lines found on their debut, but with the eleven-minute “The Wish” they lay the groundwork for the lengthy song-structure that would become a doom standard. Only the heaviest of all heavy bands could take worship lyrics and incorporate them into a song as punishing as “The Skull.”

A banshee howl is a bit of an anomaly in doom metal, but the juxtaposition of power metal and power grooves on the second Candlemass album makes it seem as natural as any guttural grunting or growling. Candlemass took a more traditional metal approach to form their unique and influential brand of doom, opting for structures and solos more akin to Rush than Blue Cheer. As a halfway-point between Sabbath and Mercyful Fate, one could find none more evil sounding or musically strong.

Pioneers of the death-doom genre, Winter’s sole full-length album was full of dense gothic metal that wasn’t black, but wasn’t pretty, either. On Into Darkness, the kick drum and toms all sound the same, making for a flurry of battering-ram fills and a hypnotic single-note pulse. Guitar riffs crawl from the mud and the bass drones in the background. John Alman’s vocals are visceral slow-bursts about habitual dreams and eternal frost, moving forward the depressing theme of desolation in a vast, frozen nothingness.

Minutes of feedback begin the album, followed by the loudest drums ever, building to a slow-churn riff that pulses with evil. The album is six sludgy songs jammed into one half-hour-plus track, but the amazing part is that the band included three covers (two of which are by Alice Cooper) into the mix and didn’t miss a step. Only the Melvins.

“Dirge” is the only word that can describe the so-slow-it-might-be-going-backwards music of Thergothon. A single guitar drones simple power chords as a keyboards float around eerie tones in the upper register, swirling around with washes and broken melodies that would be more at home in a funeral parlor in Hell. The vocals are nearly indecipherable, but that’s not the point. The point is that such torment can only be delivered in a sludge-growl, and if it could be spoken or sang it wouldn’t be worth it.

Doom Troop

These albums didn’t storm out of the gates, but plodded out of them. The songs may move slowly and with a heavy hand, but they cause the universe to throb in their wake. After the foundations of doom were laid by these bands, newer artists upped the ante, turning the genre into a game of one-upping the previous “doom epic,” a contest where the listener wins every time.

The copyright of the article Getting Started with Doom Metal (1985-1994) in Metal Music is owned by Ryan Werner. Permission to republish Getting Started with Doom Metal (1985-1994) in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.