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Griftegård > Psalmbok > Reviews
Griftegård - Psalmbok

Griftegård - Psalm Bok - 83%

Weerwolf, March 25th, 2009

I first got to know about Griftegard at the DDD festival (a doom festival in the Netherlands) last year. We were walking from the station towards the venue, but seeing as this was the first time we were frequenting this particular venue, we were kind of lost. So it took us much longer then expected to arrive there, which sucked quite a bit, because that meant that I had missed Subrosa. It was only afterwards that I heard that they called it a day after two songs, due to technical issues, so I didn't miss that much. Upon arrival at the venue, I bought my ticket and was waiting for my friends to pay for theirs, when I heard something unbelievably HEAVY in the background. This was my first encounter with Griftegard and their no-mercy-heavy-as-hell doom metal. I ended up seeing them for only about 10 minutes, but it were the best damn 10 minutes of 2008! Psalm Bok is heavy. Really heavy. It could just end my review here, but perhaps you prefer a more in-depth description?

Ok. Griftegard has a religious theme and imagery, they may not be wearing a thousand crosses like Reverend Bizarre, but they are nonetheless an orthodox doom metal band. To add to this religious feel, we can hear a choir singing at the beginning of Charles Taze Russell – the absolute heaviness that follows the chants tells you pretty much all you need to know about Griftegard. Looking back at those 10 minutes in Rotterdam I was not only impressed by the sheer heaviness, but even more so by the super vocals of Thomas Eriksson. He delivers them in a clean fashion, but also some harsher ones appear to give the extra bit of emotion at certain times during a song. The fact that the music is so heavy, but the vocals fairly melodious makes for a great and surprising combination. Musically this is some of the slowest and heaviest traditonal metal that you'll come accross. This doesn't speed up at all and yet it's fantastic all the way. Though it's pretty safe to say that if slow mus! ic is not your thing, then stay away from this one as far as possible, since it will bore you to death. When their performance was finished I remember standing in complete shock, staring in front of me, not quite fully grasping what I just saw/experienced. I thought I had seen it all, little did I know that later that day Worship had plans to destroy everything on its path with their performance…So I guess my statement about those 10 minutes being the best of 2008 wasn’t really true. It was however a real memorable performace and the same can be said about Psalm Bok.