I retured to that list of albums with great riffs and pulled this out.
Genres: Stoner, Doom, Death
Release: 2008
This is a highly unusual album to describe, which is why I want to review it: I like to think of myself as good at writing description. Anyway, the riffs are all over the place genre-wise: Heavily distorted
stoner rock, melodic sludge metal, regular sludge, and epic death/doom. Sometimes, two totally different styles are played right after the other, but it works incredibly well. Speed is never consistent either. One second it is wall-of-fuzz, noise or drone, very slow, edgy riffs, (or very slow, melodic playing!) the next it is bright, more uptempo riffs. The solos are high-pitched and piercing loud, sort of like Quorthon soloing on
Blood Fire Death, only more akin to Stoner than black metal.
So the guitar playing is all over the map.
The vocals are nasty, if that makes any sense: guttural, gurgle-y, death metal vocals, sung slowly (nothing like Suffocation), and played low in the mix. It is very easy to forget about the vocals actually. They stand out from the instrumentation, but the instrumentation is usually always changing and is far more interesting to me.
"Bare minimum" describes the drumming pretty well. The drummer is very quiet in the background, and plays in very odd timing, but still in rhythm with the guitars. Like the album, very rarely does the drumming ever speed up.
Acid Witch does not **** around with your attention on this album. No fade outs, sparse intros, and all the songs flow directly into one another. Literally, it is like one giant recording cut into multiple "songs". There is music all the time too, no silence, and the riffs only stop playing for the solos. Even the intro tracks "Intro" and "Beastly Brew" are wall-of-noise.
Last but certainly not least, the sound effects. Bubbling (cauldrons, I assume would be a proper interpretation), the sounds of footsteps in the forest, screams, wolves howling, and many other spooky things provide a limited atmosphere, they are very high quality samples too.
One complaint I have with this album is that it drags on far too long, and that hurts my rating of it. Around track 9 it started to get repetitive.
Favorite tracks: I like all of the tracks, but "Cauldron Cave" is easily the best. An oddly placed organ opens with some atmospheric sound effects played over it open the track, then an equally out-of-place, fiery solo plays before the song descends into full on death/doom straight out of a Coffins album.
Sick! Briks, if you are reading this, you should listen to this song. You will maybe like it, I am not sure. It is very short so you will not have to suffer for long.
My other favorite would be "Into the Cave" because it has my favorite riffs on the whole album.
Overall rating: 3/5