Rating: 8.9

Country: Germany

Release Date: 2007

Record Label: Endzeit Elegies
/Painiac Records

Track list:
1. Endzeit Elegy
2. All I Ever Knew Lie Dead
3. The Altar and the Choir of the Moonkult
4. Graveyard Horizon
5. Zorn a Rust-Red Scythe
6. Devived
7. Mirror of Sorrow (Solitude Aeturnus cover)
8. I Am the End - Crucifixion Part II

Total playing time 01:12:51

Band Website: Worship

Worship - Dooom

The Doommonger- Vocals, Choirs, Lead Guitars, Bass, Bells
Satachrist - Rhythm Guitar, Clean guitars and Steelstring
Fucked Up Mad Max - Vocals, Drums

Dooom is a brilliant concept album by Worship, the cult extreme/funeral doom band that became the cynosure of every doom metalhead's ears when one of its members, Fucked Up Mad Max, committed suicide by jumping over a bridge. In a relatively sober genre where mournful, depressive and even suicidal themes are commonplace, people were taken by surprise when this music actually accounted for a suicide. Although no one, at least publicly, knows the real reason behind Mad Max's suicide, it is widely speculated that the depressive doom music fuelled his motive to end his life and there are also unsubstantiated reports of Mad Max's family burning down his entire music collection after his demise.

The theme of their demo (last released on CD as Last CD To Doomsday) is ostensibly carried forward on Dooom where the dreaded doomsday has already occurred. The story of this album begins when the protagonist awakens from his grave to find the world that he had left behind is now completely destroyed. ‘Book 1' (songs 1-4) is mainly about him learning about the predicament he has woken into and his coming to terms with it. The hallmark of the music on Dooom is that it seemingly aims to reflect the very sentiments involved in the unfolding of the events in the story. Album opener “I Endzeit Elegy” for instance is expectedly a very disorienting song with an alienating industrial feel, comparable to Woods of Belial in that aspect. Unlike the continuous flowing style of funeral doom, the flow of music on this track is interrupted very frequently and resumed with a rather startling striking sound of the bell, serving perhaps to shatter the spell being gradually cast by the emotive tunes to remind us of the bleak, desolate and painful reality that lies ahead for Norban, their protagonist.

“All I Ever Knew Lie Dead” is where he ventures out into the ruins of the dead, post-apocalyptic world and naturally it is here that he is hurt the most. To portray that emotion, Worship have crafted an opening tune which is easily one of the best I've heard on a doom album. The beautiful leads, spiralling ever so slowly through the air, progressively tighten your chest with every winding till a stage is reached where your heart gets so badly squeezed you would think it can no longer beat for you. When the tunes turn eerily haunting later on in the song, your heart freezes and you know for sure then that you don't have to worry about its functioning anymore. The excruciatingly slow music in the following song is evocative of early My Dying Bride which mingled with the crushing emotional music of Ataraxie exudes the same soul-denting pressure that you would feel drifting helplessly 30,000 feet below the ocean's surface. “Graveland Horizon” with its clean vocals is once again reminiscent of Ataraxie and My Dying Bride, this time of their mid-era days and also features the imaginative, tense atmosphere of Void of Silence which dramatises the feelings of the protagonist, who at this stage has stumbled into a house where he sees though his water-filled eyes the remnants of a mysterious woman's body: mere rags and ashes.

‘Book 2' (songs 5-8) begins with “Zorn a Rust-Red Scythe” which sees a piano being employed, its sweet and gentle notes unassumingly making their way around towering, deafeningly heavy riffs akin to Thor's Hammer, the former representing the innocent mind of Norban struggling to come to terms with the reasoning provided by the great ‘Moonkult' for the unleashing the apocalypse. You will observe that the music in this part of ‘book' becomes exceedingly heavy and slow, and like Rigor Sardonicus or Esoteric gets difficult to endure as it thoroughly crushes your spirit. But the beauty of the album is that for its intimidating and oft-unsettling mammoth riffs there are always beautiful, emotionally rich tunes that capture your imagination and project phantasmagoric images on the screen of your mind. Poignant and expressive leads unfailingly show up usually towards the end of the songs to stir up your settled emotions and create a vivid lasting impression. As for what happens to our dear protagonist, I shall leave it to you readers to find out for yourself. If the music of Dooom wasn't a big enough incentive for you to spend your money on it, the CD version comes in a hand-trembling 10-fold digipack edition with full artworks on each sleeve, both relevant and breathtaking.

Notwithstanding separately recorded material from 2000-2007 including ones with Mad Max's participation, Dooom is an album unified in essence and at the same time more disjointed and dynamic than the ones we are normally subjected to. Playing quintessential extreme/funeral doom for an interminable length of 73 minutes, it is definitely not an album for the romantic souls. To the concerned withered souls, Dooom is one of the best extreme/funeral doom albums to be released in the last five years.

November 29th, 2007