review: Stygian Crown

Stygian Crown

Stygian Crown

Cruz Del Sur Music

26 June 2020

Playing slow and heavy is more than a temporary trend, and has ended up becoming a lasting popular choice for metal musicians and fans. Unfortunately, the result is that there are too many bands are good in an average way, and that are too centered on simply playing slow. Besides the just-ok über simplistic slow guitar playing and sleepy-jack drumming, the vocals often seem only so-so: some fat-belly yelling, lots of hollering, emotionally-distressed screaming, medication-addict squawking, so on and so forth. Regardless, the American listeners have spoken and they have said that they like it, otherwise why do so many average-ok doom bands keep popping up in a such an unrelenting, stubborn and endless fashion year after year after year? You like it! Would you feel the same way if you heard a bunch of them every month? Not two or three; but more like 25 stoner, sludge and groove bands a month. Maybe you would still like them all?

Not all of us are convinced with all the simplistic doom mania, a sort of contemporary explosion of the blues, if you will. The blues by a different name but the blues all the same. There are exceptions, however. What if a band confronts the problem of the vocals? What if they dedicate themselves to solving said problem? Maybe it means learning to sing, taking vocal lessons or finding a singer. The thing is that in metal singing is scarce. Somewhere along the line it became acceptable to have average vocals, due to the necessity or the desire by guitarists to have total control. The guitarists decided to holler over a microphone rather dealing with learning to sing or finding a singer: “Forget it! I’ll just do the vocals myself and that way I can have more control over everything!” Good for business, good for egos, good for efficiency. Not good for art.

Doom fans, say “hello” to Stygian Crown. They are here to help us all get out of the quagmire of average-ok doom. All the above problems are addressed. It turns out that doom can be great. Who knew! They have a real heavy (enough for death metal) guitar sound, and it’s clean so that the listener can hear the riffs. They have a strong, traditional voice that challenges the listener to sing along. You probably can’t keep up, but you’ll want to try it out. Just pretend that you can! The songs themselves stand out from each other, but because the album lasts more than 50 minutes, it will take a few listens before it feels like the entire picture has come together. The songs are heavy, of course, but there are guitar melodies to help the listener along, and there are also guitar solos, and that adds variety to the songs. The pace of the songs is slow, but there are some segments in which they pick up the pace to a nice, headbobbing point, and this helps to avoid the monotony of a formula. Of course, this is still doom, it might still be too slow for too much of the time for some metal fans who are not big on doom. Perhaps this is still too strictly framed within the doom genre for other fans to dig it, especially if they want a little bit more upbeat or headbanging moments. Nevertheless, for most fans of doom with singing this album should be a very pleasant experience and maybe a contender for album of the month, of the summer and may be on the short list of candidates for doom album of the year.

Stygian Crown by Stygian Crown