Register Forgot login?

© 2002-2024
Encyclopaedia Metallum

Privacy Policy

Heavy Lord > From Cosmos to Chaos > Reviews
Heavy Lord - From Cosmos to Chaos

Heavier than the Hulk's scrotum - 89%

Noktorn, April 20th, 2009

This is an album which really doesn't fuck around; ten seconds into 'Elephaunt' really communicate the entirety of this music. Everything about this band's aesthetic seems designed to make actually listening to their albums to determine their style irrelevant- their name is Heavy Lord, for fuck's sake! Two massive things in a single title! The first track is a giant fucking animal!

Heavy Lord's music is pretty elephantlike in general: lumbering, massive, and steady, smacking aside other, smaller bands with ease. Like a more relaxed and self-assured form of Maegashira, Heavy Lord pounds out slow, head-drooping tunes very much in the style of stoner/doom titans Zoroaster, but with just a little bit more rock and roll and a bit less oppressive drone. This is sort of a middle territory of stoner/doom, deeply rooted in the American origins of the genre (though with definite throwbacks to Black Sabbath), with elements of such found in sudden bursts into frantic soloing over speedy, crashing drumming like about two thirds through 'The Ego Has Landed', but also close to the more extreme reaches of the genre in its burly Dark-Angel-by-way-of-Crowbar vocals and more insistent, chugging riffs. Not content to merely rehash the typical Sabbathisms of a band like Sleep, Heavy Lord occupy a stoner/doom/heavy rock area resembling a less bluesy Mister Bones loaded on horse tranquilizers and cheap liquor.

While the tempo makes occasional shifts upward, it's typically behemothlike in its delivery, with big, thundering steps communicated through crashing tom fills and massively sustained power chords with a guitar tone clearly clawed out of ancient, cracked-cased amplifiers and an infatuation for the oldest of oldschool. Heavy Lord feels like they're more in the improvisational areas of the genre ala Zoroaster rather than the more precisely structured material such as Sleep, and the songs tend to ebb and flow rather naturally, forming organic peaks and valleys where all but one member's instrument will halt entirely before the band comes crashing back in like a truck through the wall of your home. It's traditional music, but it's not entirely stylistically beholden to other bands, and some of the more ominous moments like in 'One Is A Billion' seems to indicate a darker, more lurking underpinning to these sounds than you might notice on first listen.

As you can imagine, I highly recommend this material to any and all stoner/doom fans out there; I can't find anything wrong with this music, and it manages to stay gripping and massive throughout its entire running time (something of a rarity for stoner/doom in general). If you want to get drunk and rock out, I can hardly think of a better album to do it to than this one, and if you're a metalhead, that should signify this as being good as sold.

"Ultra heavy doom from the underground..." - 78%

Zombie_Quixote, June 12th, 2008

From the horses mouth: "NO keyboards, NO female singers and NO violins and other bullshit – this is ultra heavy doom from the underground. A fucking tribute to bands like Cathedral, Electric Wizard, Crowbar, Sleep and Eyehategod."

That quote leads me to believe that they have the Reverend Bizarre approach to doom metal, and that isn't far removed from the truth. They have a retro-progressive approach to doom, essentially playing Iommi-esque riffs with more of a razor like sharpness to them. They slow it down, let the guitars wail for as long as they can before progressing to the next part of the riff. Rinse and repeat, you've got yourselves Heavy Lord. The vocals kind of sound like Tom G Warrior if he got really high, and you know, I can hear a bit of the Celtic Frost gallop in some of the riffs, albeit played at doomish pace, not unlike the newest effort from Warrior and his crew.

The formula may seem simple, and perhaps sound boring, but nothing could be further from what this band delivers. It's kind of like a Tarantino flick. Tarantino doesn't necessarily bring anything new into his pictures, a lot of his movies are essentially over-wrought tributes to old gangster films, martial arts films, and samurai movies; but goddammit they fucking work. He smears the lens a bit, he produces it in such a way that it's as though we've never seen it before which makes us forget that we have. The analogy works perfectly for Heavy Lord. They're Sabbath, they're EyeHateGod, they're Cathedral, they're Electric Wizard; and they're Crowbar and they're Sleep; but they're also just Heavy Lord and proud of it.