Church Of Misery - Houses Of The Unholy (2009)

[alan nagsworth]

This album gets its own thread because it's fucking superb!



Seriously, fans of Sabbath, Comets On Fire and Eyehategod will probably bum this album into next week. I know I have been doing just that since it came in the post last week. It's like stoner blues metal that has a tendency to start extremely doomy and then veer off into a wild psychedelic freakout with a bladdy oresum guitar solo.

They are a Japanese band and they are tremendous. The riffs are meaty as fuck, all the songs are based around specific serial killers, and the record sleeve is designed to look like an old jazz LP, from the large print fonts to the colour schemes within the booklet, and finishing off with the vinyl print image on the disc and the awesomely cool black underside to said disc... the whole thing is just an arty masterpiece, it's easily one of the best doom albums (even though it's not always strictly doom) I've heard since I got into the genre about a month ago.

Heirs to the throne of Black Sabbath and no mistake!

[Captain Crunch]

I had a first spin of this last night and was nodding along quite happily until they murdered a Sir Lord Baltimore track.  Sweet blimey, they've got some bad ju-ju coming for that one, it's an abomination. 

They played recently didn't they?  Was it any good?