I know I'm inordinately inclined to enjoy drawn-out, plodding doom metal, but this album by Spanish doomsters Warchetype doesn't quite do it for me, even if everything about it looks good on paper. The band's influences are firmly traditional for this genre, with Candlemass , St.Vitus and of course the more lugubrious moments from the Black Sabbath catalogue looming large among their reference points. The guitar tone is perfect for this style of music - a low, craggy Gibson rumbling channeled through vintage amps. The vocals are dramatic and mostly clean, the lyrical themes abstruse and desolate.

There are flashes of groove and melody on songs like 'Hangover' or 'Marduk Stairs To Earth'. But for the most part, the music here is too close to the template to really excite me - check out 'Itaca', for instance. After the acoustic intro, we're submerged in 40 feet of sonic lead as the guitarists crank out a riff that is clearly intended to evoke Black Sabbath's self-titled opus cross-fertilised with a vocal delivery that's reminiscent of early Candlemass, although it moves into a gruffer register as well. Somewhere along the line, the song moves from a geological pace to a merely historical one, and there's a couple of guitar solos along the way, but they're rather lukewarm and truncated, especially considering how everything else is so extended. 'Death Card (The Sun of the Country Priest)' has some good parts, but is constructed rather shoddily. Perhaps the biggest drawback is in the vocals, which are often rather grating and hammy, although they work better in a gruffer register. Frankly, this guy sounds like he'd be better off doing a Bon Scott sort of thing, or tipping over into all-out growling.

While Warchetype are making all the right generic moves, they just aren't doing them especially interestingly. It isn't that the length is an issue here - although it's true that these songs are all very long, often somewhere around the 20-minute - or that they don't do a lot of different things during the course of that length, so much as that they do all these perfectly acceptable, even commendable, things, without any especial flair or inspiration. It was possible to accuse the Reverend Bizarre album, to which I gave such a high rating earlier this year, of over-extending everything in the name of doom, but there's no denying that the individual riffs and changes were excellent by any standard. The same just isn't consistently true here. And the material isn't even leftfield or quirky enough to succeed without the benefit of strong melodies and hooks and some sense of energy - this isn't Khanate-style entropic sludge. There are smatterings of a more cohesive, impactful sound here and there, but the Warchetype guys really need to work on focusing more on their good ideas rather than just doddering around with lurching power chords and producing more atmosphere than substance.

Year of Release: 2007

Label: Alone