In the dark satanic mills of the Midlands' industrial heartland in the late 60s, a young sheet metal machine operator chopped off the tips of two fingers in an accident, and inadvertently created one of the most popular genres of music in the modern age - Heavy Metal - and its gloomier, harsher offspring, Doom. That man was Tony Iommi, guitarist with Black Sabbath, who customized thimbles out of melted down washing-up liquid bottles to wear as the synthetic tips of his middle and ring fingers on his right fretting hand. The lack of feeling necessitated a slower, heavier style of guitar playing. The dirge-y, atomic blues of Sabbath and their strange brew of monolithic riffs, cheap drugs, foreboding aesthetics and existential angst were dragged underground and shaped by the progenitors of the emergent Doom scene.
Doom's unifying sound is one of bleak, crushing soundscapes, played at a tempo and volume so monumental and elemental that the Earth might crack. Two men in particular are responsible for developing the classic Doom sound in the late 70s and early 80s. Victor Griffin is currently guitarist with Place Of Skulls but made his name with Virginian group Pentagram, who (along with seminal Doom outfit Trouble) remained faithful to the gloomy, down-tuned Sabbath imprint, and on albums such as Day of Reckoning, Relentless and Trouble's Psalm 9 invested the music with a spiritual, and even religious, self-examination, which became one of the genre's perennial themes. In biblical terms, Doom is the Last Judgement, and this strand of Doom's preoccupation with apocalypse and End of Days ('Endtyme') narratives acknowledge God as much as the Devil, subverting the commonly held notion that heavy music is inherently pro-Satan. Just as important in its nascent stages was Scott 'Wino' Weinrich's intimidating presence as vocalist of Saint Vitus, and guitarist/vocalist with The Obsessed. He imbued the genre with a dangerous punk aesthetic, executing its slow metallic grooves with feral urgency on classics Born Too Late and The Church Within.
A literate and subversive genre, Doom takes grimm inspiration from HP Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Dennis Wheatley and its visual cues from Hieronymous Bosch, Gustav Doré, Aubrey Beardsley and late 60s/early 70s counter-cultural psychedelia. Dorset Doomers Electric Wizard eschew any notions of religious self-examination to plunder Lovecraft and 70s horror/biker films for audio samples to fuel their hateful cosmic nihilism. Their albums are stunning monuments to the Uncanny. Sonically massive and unwieldy they push powerful vintage amplification equipment to the limits of molten distortion on their superb second album Come My Fanatics and their masterpiece, Dopethrone. The sound of an acid trip spiralling into the chasm, their philosophy is simple: 'Legalize Drugs and Murder'. As for the influence of strong marijuana on the Doom scene, only the brave or very stoned can endure the epic psychosis of Sleep's one hour-long track incantation/sonic decimation Dopesmoker. Forever on the fringes of the metallic mainstream, 2007 saw Stephen O' Malley and Greg Anderson bring their blackened Doom-Drone Sunn 0))) project to the Royal Festival Hall as part of Jarvis Cocker's Meltdown, and breach hipster consciousness like a waking nightmare.
The choice is yours: Doom or be DOOMED.
