Month: January 2017

After almost three years from the excellent All Hell’s Martyrs we find again Dread Sovereign, what seems to have become the current musical priority of Alan Averill aka Nemtheanga, given the prolonged silence of Primordial. For Doom The Bell Tolls comes out in 12″ format and actually consists of three real tracks, plus two instrumentals and a cover of Venom’s Live Like An Angel, Die Like A Devil. The content of the work, although it may have an impromptu character due to its relative brevity, seems to lean towards forms of heavy doom more in line with tradition, although always made restless by the uncommon vocal timbre of Averill, without missing accelerations that in the previous full length were not exhibited so convincingly. However, I think that, as often happens in ep’s, there is a main song with all the others that act as a corollary, and there is no doubt that this corresponds to Twelve Bells Toll In Salem, a long episode that in my opinion best represents the true nature of Dread Sovereign, with its heavy psychedelic load that makes room in the second part compared to the first half in which, instead, dominates the usual overflowing interpretation of Nemtheanga on a magnificent doom carpet. It would be easy to dismiss Dread Sovereign as a sort of 16 rpm version of Primordial, in light of the presence of drummer Sol Dubh who, with the vocalist, composes the rocky rhythmic base: in reality things are not like that because, as already amply demonstrated in All Hell’s Martyrs, Bones proves once again to be a versatile guitarist and able to move the sound of the band on different stylistic levels, passing from the classic tones of the genre to gothic nuances, which in this case are manifested more in a track at times from the nephilimiani hints as The Spines Of Saturn. For the rest, This World Is Doomed is also good, especially in its second part, when the psychedelic doom takes the stage compared to a more animated initial phase, while the Venom cover is the classic element that nothing adds and nothing takes away from the value of a work that offers at least half an hour of convincing music, confirming, above all, the fact that Dread Sovereign are not just a diversion for Alan Averill, which bodes well for the future.

2017 – Ván Records