Saint Vitus - Saint Vitus (1984)
This is what Saint Vitus sounded like before Wino. I forget this dude's name but I'm too high to really feel like looking it up (as one should be when listening to Saint Vitus). But the vocals here are definitely solid. Unlike the more personal writing on Born too Late, this album makes use of camp and occult themes to pretty good effect. White magic/black magic is appropriately satanic and rebellious and Zombie Hunger is just a bit of decomposing fun.
This is kind of an odd record. They're a metal band, but signed to Black Flag's label SST and sharing a producer with Black Flag during an era when many punks and metalheads where skeptical even of crossover. And there is quite a lot of hardcore here. The opener, Saint Vitus, is sort of like hardcore at a jog, rather than a sprint. It even has gang vocals.
Despite that, however, this band actually really pushed doom music in a slower, more, even, funeral direction with tracks like Burial at Sea. I think Saint Vitus was one of the first bands to approach slowness as something that had had to be continually pushed forward, and they certainly did on this release. This is like Sabbath on Robitussin, or Black Flag on heroin.
They KISS in terms of riffs like a punk band but it sounds great and all of the songs are anchored by strong melodies and concepts. I like the roughness of the recording. Idk, this album just has a certain allure to it. Definitely an important push into slower and heavier territory from one of the most classic metal bands period. An early example of sludge?