review: Capilla Ardiente

Capilla Ardiente

The Siege

High Roller Records

13.09.2019

“This is epic!” and “That was epic!” are two ways that people go around throwing the term epic for just about anything that they like. It is common practice to speak of “epic” heavy metal and “epic” doom. The long-running band Capilla Ardiente seems to be annoyed with how people use the word “epic.” They are simply asking, “How can a song be epic if it’s only 3 minutes long?!”

Maybe it rocks. Maybe it’s cool. However, you cannot be epic in 3-5 minutes. That’s what they seem to be saying with their second album. Take a look for yourself.

1.The Open Arms, the Open Wounds 13:19

2.The Crimson Fortress 09:41

3.The Spell of Concealment 09:45

4.Fallen Alphas and the Rising 13:11

total time 45:56

The album is a statement. Capilla Ardiente is dedicated to the art of epic traditional doom metal, as you see from the song information above.

This album requires a lot of patience. You have to trust that the veterans know what they are doing. They have plenty of riffs and guitar solos. They try to give people good traditional/classic epic doom singing, and the good singing is not just there as a necessary evil to avoid being an instrumental band, but due to the long songs and the extended instrumental passages that’s exactly how some of the music sounds: like an instrumental band for a lot of the music’s duration. The album is a rewarding work for audiences of epic doom, but it would be too ambitious for casual fans of doom. One reason is that these long songs go off on tangents and by the time they return to the chorus you might thinking that you kind of remember the chorus from a while back or maybe you don’t remember it at all. In that situation a good way that you will be able to become familiar with the song is by hearing it a bunch of times.

The result of the tangents is that the music turns into progressive metal wrapped in a huge umbrella of doom. The band is obviously skilled. The production is a strong point of the album. The singing fits the music very well. Perhaps if the listener is prepared by understanding that the music is actually progressive doom, by comprehending that this album is not accessible like the vast majority of doom. If the listener accepts that proposition, then the music will open up in a different way than perhaps might be expected. It will prove too proggy for some fans, but those discerning doom customers will welcome a brand new big project to explore and to come back to as they join the mighty quest to make doom metal epic again.

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