lista zespołów Death Doom Altar Of Betelgeuze Darkness Sustains the Silence

When you start listening to the debut album of these guys, it’s pretty much probable that you believe you’ll be listening to some death-doom record, in fact, that’s what the opening song (not counting with the intro), “A World Without End” is: a mid-tempo death metal track with deep roaring vocals and the slow, crushing doom aura. But the real deal only shows itself when “The Spiral Of Decay” kicks in. The doom is all in there and some traditional heavy Metal riffs pop up, things start to go faster and Matias Nastolin’s vocals also adapt to the same kind found in the most pure form of Metal. And that’s when we start thinking that the influences of this Finnish band might not (just) be entities like their fellow countrymen Skepticism, but rather something in the likes of Black Sabbath and Candlemass.
In the line-up, two of the eight tracks are more likely to catch your attention: the 17 minute title-track and “Smoldering Clouds Above Orion”. The first one it states the obvious that the band is trying to create a masterpiece, though opinions may differ (and for me this is just a good album). I have to say that the band has really put an effort on this one, mixing everything they do best and never falling into boredom for the almost twenty minutes this song has. “Smoldering Clouds (…)” is purely death-doom, but sounding different from everything else. It just happens that this is a re-recording of a song from the 2012 EP “At the Shrine of Light”, the first recording of Altar Of Betelgeuze, by that time, a very different band, one that thrived closely to funeral doom with a very dense cosmic atmosphere layered by keyboards. It’s very interesting to see how, in less than two year's time, the band’s sound has evolved into what it is now.
Altar of Betelgeuze combines Doom metal with classical Heavy in perfect harmony, just listen to “Steamroller”, and by doing so they include themselves in the growing ranks of retro doom metal bands that really can keep their genre alive.