 Italy’s Thunderstorm aren’t quite doom metal newbies – this is their third studio album, and they’ve been on tour with genre giants Candlemass in the past. Still, while they’re certainly a talented band and have definite doom elements, I can’t help but wonder why they feel the need to be slotted as doom metal as such. With slightly different arrangements they could easily swing towards melodic hard rock, prog metal or, though I hate to even suggest this, power metal.
Which makes it sound like this album might be a bit of a shambles – thankfully it isn’t. The songwriting, melody and playing are all perfectly fine – but I just don’t feel the despair. While much of the riffing clearly works within the doom idiom – which is basically 70s hard rock or metal speeded up anyway, for the most part - it doesn’t really have that tolling, funereal impact that the genre affiliation suggests. Part of the problem might be the vocalist, who is perfectly capable at his task, but sounds like he’d be just as happy in a straight forward hard rock band, perhaps with a touch of Queensryche-like melodrama and pomp.
The music exhibits some of the same identity problem – there’s just too much of a happyish, sometimes rather bland, general hard rock vibe underlying the sound. They’re at their most doomy on songs like ‘We Die As We Dream (Alone)’, ‘Hypnowheel Of Life’ or ‘S.L.O.W.’, which also happen to be songs that follow the doom template most slavishly. (Leif Edling is probably wondering exactly when he wrote ‘S.L.O.W.’, and how it sneaked its way onto a Thunderstorm album.) Give them a little leeway and they gamely chug through songs like ‘Hawking Radiation’ or ‘Death Rides On The Highway’, which come across as slightly solemn but are still essentially melodic hard rock songs, and sound like a more comfortable fit for the band. Their cover of Hendrix’ ‘Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)’ is another case in point. While it’s certainly been made more doomish, it suggests that they could easily be a convincing hard rock band, although a rather Euro-sounding and epical one rather than the dirty US variety.
This isn’t necessarily a problem, of course. And it’s probably wrong to allow genre pre-conceptions to colour one’s judgement so much, but that’s actually part of my point. Identifying with a certain genre implies a certain set of inherent characteristics that can’t be cold-bloodedly manufactured to order, try as you might. You’re invoking a standard by which you’re going to be judged. Somewhat like various Indian prog bands who seem to basically be pop-rock/power metal outfits with a lot of tempo shifts, keyboard intros and unison riffs thrown in to justify the prog tag (but nowhere near as lame), Thunderstorm sound like a band that could easily, and more comfortably, embrace a different identity from the one they’ve chosen.
Year of Release: 2007
Label: Drangonheart
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