I’ve seen this UK-based band’s music tagged as ‘stoner doom’, and that’s fair enough, but it only provides a rough idea of what you can expect from them. Personally, I’d call it epic doom, but that label has probably already been claimed by bands that sound very different from this, the world of metal subgenres being what it is.

Made up of two epic tracks which add up to a bit less than half an hour’s worth of music in all, Antarctic Abyss takes listeners through a vast, somber, texturally rich and darkly evocative sonic voyage. ‘Under The Ice - The Resurrection’ certainly fits the stoner doom mould, with its at-a-crawl, wall-to-wall fuzz dripping riffs, but there’s a sense of immensity and solitude that comes as much from the intangible element of ‘feel’ (as muso types used to say back when I used to hang out with them) as it does from the actual notes and arrangements. The vocals, when they come in, are an almost-chanted recital, a bleak invocation that just seals the icy atmosphere hinted at by the song title and the music – which is as precise and cold as this sort of music can get without losing that leaden sense of doom.  The song never shifts into a speedier tempo, and it doesn’t need to. The sound is immense and heavy as it is. ‘Haunted Tide - The Freezing Storm’ channels some of the Lovecraftian menace Metallica hinted at in ‘The Thing Which Should Not Be’, considerably slowed down and embellished just a little with an organ sound that blends seamlessly into the wash of overdriven guitar. The mood of this song is as bleak and vast as its predecessor’s, but with a more aggressive edge. The vocals are again this very eerie, otherworldly almost-whispered intonation. In a strange way, the vocals put me in mind of a very serious Syd Barrett who was mainly into Lovecraft and Poe and a lot of downers, instead of Lear and LSD. The song accelerates from down tempo territory into a superbly crushing sequence which moves into a completely stripped-down and eerie finale that approaches funeral doom territory.

Musically, The Deep Blue clearly know what they are doing, and how to go about it. They use simple tools – largely, power-chord based riffs with the odd bit of mood-building noodling and uncluttered but tasteful drumming to achieve definite aims. It wouldn’t have worked if any of the musicians had tried to grab a bit more of the spotlight for themselves. Restraint, taste and doom-laden riffs that could crush the earth – that’s the bottom line. Go for it if you like Electric Wizard’s more drawn out jams, the slower bits on Karma To Burn records or the first two Black Sabbath records.



Year of Release: 2007
Label: Above All Records/The Church Within Records