God-Shroud - Angels of Darkness and Light (2013) | 10%

Shroud of Shite

Oh boy. Oh boy. This is perhaps the worst traditional doom album I ever heard. How can you fucking suck that much at the genre ? Even if you do, you'll probably manage to write boring riffs but it won't be too obnoxious, only forgettable. Frankly, the genre isn't quite hard to play, it's not technical and the compositions are often simple and emotional. God-Shroud, a duo composed of two brothers managed to be thoroughly obnoxious and terrible for seventy minutes. Seventy cruel minutes I'll never get back.

The only good thing about this release is its cover art, it reminds me of Shrinebuilder's sole album with its orange sun and divine look. Don't make the mistake of listening to them because of it though, this review will serve as a warning and heed its call! Yes it has sabbathesque riffs but Tony Iommi could have recorded better ones with a Fisher Price guitar when he was in the hospital treating his cancer. The band utterly fails at everything they do. They try to be an heavy doom band, they fail. They try to be somewhat atmospheric, yeah, they fail at that as well. The songs are all too long, averaging seven minutes and they're all uninteresting sewage of lifeless tired doom. There's also solos to be found here and even if they suck, they're probably the best thing about the duo, they're pretty bad on “Stormhead” but it's better than the rest of their music. The riffs are mostly slow, boring turds that doesn't even try to be or sound good. A band who can't write interesting stuff can usually save itself with its atmosphere, but here we have shitty Casio synth piano parts that tries very hard to be as deep as My Dying Bride.

Another horrendous detail about this album is the production. I think it's the worse one I heard for a band playing this genre and it's totally unforgivable for a 2013 release, it wouldn't had been acceptable for 1980 either while I'm at it. The sound is very muddy, not clear at all and the tone of the riffs is really synthetic and unnatural. I believe honesty and real instrumentations are important in doom. It's a genre rooted in traditions and having programmed drums is an true offense to Bill Ward. Playing drums for this genre is not difficult especially if the tempos are slow like they are here. You can't hardly fail at doom but for some unfathomable reasons, Henry and John Isaac were able to do it. They don't understand the genre and they butchered it.

John writes the music and play the instruments while Henry sings and writes the lyrics, it's a cool novelty to have a duo composed of brothers but I prefer Hanson, thank you very much. Honestly, Henry is probably there only because his brother is even worse than he is at singing. He's probably the worst offender here, he can't even be called a singer, he's usually what, whispering? It's as annoying as when a stranger tries to speak to you when you're trying to do a number two in a public bathroom, you just want him to be quiet. I tried to ignore the production, the riffs and the awful music and I were mildly successful but there's no way you can ignore these atrocious and laughable vocals. He tries to sound like Nick Holmes of Paradise Lost sometimes but without any success. The dude has absolutely no range and even a deaf dog wouldn't sign this band.

Every time a song ends, I forget all about it, a new almost identical mundane dirge will replace it until the album ends after an insufferable seventy minutes. I had to force feed myself to most of the album. I hope their garage is big and comfortable since they'll never leave it. Stay away.