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terça-feira, 18 de fevereiro de 2014

NO HOPE FOR EXISTENCE: Bell Witch

For someone who doesn't shut the fuck up about doom metal and anything concerning doom metal I'm sure not one to be caught listening to recent doom that often. I don't do it out of spite, though, and I surely do try to avoid the sort of hipster attitude towards the genre that dismisses roughly 98% of what comes out as boring and crappy. Yet I can't but feel that a great deal of the things that come out under the "doom" label are... kinda dull? I mean a quick bandcamp browse through the recent releases for "doom" shows a bunch of bands that, well, just don't sound doomy at all to me. And the great many others around are variations on the stoner musicality that range from metal to punk to rock to pop.
Now, don't get me wrong. I don't mean that these bands are bad or anything along those lines - quite the contrary, I've praised the stoner field plenty times in this blog before, as I did with experimental, weird but ultimately interesting projects. And I'm perfectly aware that labels are silly and ultimately vague or pointless. But a guy needs his apocalyptic fix and there's only so much drone I can get through before I start craving a little musicality, a little sentimentality, the destructive hopelessness of Corrupted or the depressive (borderline emo, to tell the truth) reflexivity of Warning.



Or maybe I'm just making excuses for failing to notice Bell Witch's Longing as it came out and giving it all this time to finally listen to it. And I'm to blame for that too: it's not like I didn't know they existed, or that I've never had the chance to sit down and press play on the bandcamp stream. They had excellent reviews and were featured in the recurrent tops that plague e-media because it seems people just can't get enough of those. I had every reason and opportunity to stop and listen to the album but I didn't; it drifted down the stream like so many other flavour of the month bands ("no, seriously, this stoner band is different from the other 72, I promise!") because I forgot to put on my smart goggles for once.
Self-punishment and snark aside, Bell Witch are certainly not to be dismissed. The debut Longing is a sure step forward from their demo (you can find both at the bandcamp below) and is an honor to the bleak and the destroyed; an ode to our final days, to plunging face-first into the oblivion. It's a two-piece slow, minimalist, heavy and intense doom album that should be right up the alley of funeral doom fans, especially in the vein of Corrupted's introspective minimalism. Serve loud and with good wine, or whatever is your drug of choice.

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