Artist: Artist: Lavagoat
Title: Lavagoat
Type: Album
Label: Somnambulist Sound System

After having to recently plough my way through a pile of over polished, over produced, and soulless offerings (and all so you don’t have to folks, so never forget the sacrifices your reviewers make for you!) I was desperate to hear some music with a spine that sounded like it was played by musicians, not brought onto the world by an engineer on his computer. Hailing from Saskatoon in the cold depths of Canada, Lavagoat is a crushingly heavy doom four piece that with their debut self titled album has done just that, providing a much needed antidote to the overblown power tracks that had been poisoning my speakers! From the off the album blasts out with ‘Puritan’, a dark and doom laden anthem that would have done any early Cathedral album proud, had it been written by a young Lee Dorrian rather then these hairy axe wielding Canucks.

Rather then stay at a single funereal slog, Lavagoat up the pace with ‘Old Man And The Sea’, blackened tinges firing through the gloom with faster guitar riffs and harsher vocals, before venturing into the psychedelic plane with the trippy rock of ‘Magma’. This journey through the astral plane is followed up in short order by ‘The House’, the guitars and bass stamping out from the speakers like the march of the hordes of hell, the vocals being the very pained groan of the damned. Amongst the eight superlative tracks on the CD, Lavagoat even manage to bring off a seven minute plus instrumental in the form of ‘Interstellar Deserts Azathoth’; any band that references one of the lesser known gods of the Lovecraftian mythos wins points with me, and the fact that they do so in a number that seems to encapsulate without vocals the churning madness of that demon sultan at the centre of the universe is a testament to the bands’ skill.

With their mixing of styles, maybe Lavagoat should create a new sub-genre to describe their sound? Blackened Death Doom, or ‘Bladdoom!” for short. No, maybe not, there are more then enough divisions in metal, and rather then pigeon hole this excellent debut release, I’ll just stick to calling it bloody good! Recorded live over just two nights, energy blasts out of every second of the album. I can only hope that this sonic juggernaut blasts out from the plains of Canada to lay aural waste to these shores.

http://www.myspace.com/goatlust

Spenny Bullen

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