The Cabinet’s Metal Album of the Week: Candlemass – Psalms for the Dead

I’m terrible at describing music, and I’m particularly bad at explaining why an album is “good” or  “bad,” but I’m going to try anyway in what will be one of the revived Cabinet’s weekly columns.  I’ll start with the latest album, and purportedly the last, from the Swedish doom metal band Candlemass, Psalms for the Dead.

Before buying this album, I knew nothing about Candlemass and very little about doom metal, but I was already interested because, as any true metalhead knows, with a handful of very notable exceptions, all the metal that matters comes from Sweden.  If I were still in high school and just discovering metal, the name of the band and the album cover alone would have been enough to peak my interest, but ten minutes sampling metal on iTunes is more than enough time to learn a lesson that those of us who grew to musical maturity in the pre-MP3 age learned the hard way:  there’s often an inverse relationship between the coolness of a metal band’s name and album covers and the quality of its music.  After reading very positive reviews of Psalms for the Dead in Metal Hammer  and Decibel magazines and then sampling the album several times, I was glad to learn that this rule doesn’t apply to Candlemass.

Listening to Psalms a few dozen times has confirmed my earlier impression of doom metal:  it sounds like doom.  I know this description isn’t very useful, but if you’re familiar with the subgenre, I think you’ll agree that it’s apt.  However, a much more useful way of describing doom metal is simply to point out that in addition to inventing metal Black Sabbath also invented doom metal or that the brand of metal Sabbath invented was doom.  Chances are if you’re reading this, you’ve heard Sabbath, so you know what doom metal sounds like.  In case you haven’t, the best I can do (other than telling you to check out Black Sabbath and Paranoid immediately) is to explain that it relies on slow, heavy guitar riffs and that the vocals are more melodic and less grunty, screechy, or screamy than you probably expect from heavy metal.

Psalms consists of nine songs that the band’s website describes as being about “the presence and absence of time. . . about leaving, goodbyes and farewells . . . inner demons and false.”  Not surprisingly, the music portraying these dark themes is suitably doom-laden, with slow, heavy guitar riffs, deep, bellowing drums, and the occasional keyboard accompaniment adding a touch of eeriness throughout the album.  The songs gain variety from melodic choruses that periodically punctuate the doom.  I seem to remember reading the vocals described as a bit “Dio-ish,” and this is a good way to characterize the vocals, which are sung, rather than growled or screamed, at a pitch that’s somewhere between James Hetfield’s and King Diamond’s.

There’s not a bad song on the album, and two that stand out are “The Sound of Dying Demons” and “Waterwitch,” both of which sound scary enough to make me think twice before playing them while I’m alone in the dark.  “Dying Demons” is about an inability to escape inner demons, and its layered sounds invoke impressions of being surrounded by demons.  It opens with a ritualistic drumbeat that leads into a slow, droning guitar riff that’s soon accompanied by thunder and faint sounds of howling demons.  Melodic vocals singing of hopes that demons are gone and noting that “you thought the voices were dead” are followed by a demonic whisper claiming, “You didn’t listen!”  “Waterwitch” personifies time or death as a witch that’s stealing our lives.  Thick, doomy basslines underlie the vocals as they describe the witch whose victims can’t be saved by angels’ tears.  Slow, grooving riffs with a slight waa effect add to the sense of dread.

Part of the reason I like this album so much is that it adds variety to my metal collection.  It’s heavy and very dark while also being melodic and thus enables me to give my ears a periodic break from the brutality of bands like Skeletonwitch and Goatwhore.  It’s also nice to have choruses that I can sing along to while running.

Psalms is my only exposure to Candlemass, so I can’t compare it to their other albums, but I’ll definitely be checking them out in the near future.  The band have claimed that although they will continue playing live shows, this will be their last album.  If it does end up being their last, they will have ended with a shot of doom that’s likely to give metalheads nightmares for years.

Next week:  Kreator – Phantom Antichrist.