Written by Carcassbomb
- Everest Queen
- Dead Eden
- Doom Metal
- UK
- 2019
- 8.7/10
Dead Eden is a stoner tinged death doom album. There’s also a healthy dose of Neurosis and Melvins inspiration that gives it an overall vibe resembling a combination of Conan and Isis. It rumbles when it’s heavy and it’s fanciful when it spreads out, never losing traction in between. It was released in April and the band still have a pretty small following, this should definitely change asap, some solid stuff here. The UK produces the world’s most trustworthy doom.
The songs are typically quite long with a lot of winding build ups and hooks, it’s a genre with more similarities with post metal than your typical stoner doom. This will become pretty obvious by the halfway mark, the track Vessel of The Flesh which is purely an instrumental. They are clearly comfortable here and the record did not suffer one bit from this interlude. Space is clearly a large element of their sound in a number of ways.
The vocals on this record are death vocals but they use elongated notes and are on the deep end of range. It gets tighter and faster for the chaotic peaks that bring an air of thrash. It seems to always keep basic timing or at least a base signature, keeping a rockier element that doesn’t carry any hint of punk or extreme metal, it’s quite purely a doom/prog/post kind of setup and I can really appreciate that. It doesn’t borrow from black or death or try to fuse things too much, it just plays some solid doom/post with death vocals.
The cover art for this album was done by Kelvin Doran of Serpent Tusk Studios. He did well with this one, it really catches the darker side of doom with some really esoteric imagery and an overall cool design theory. It’s very shamanistic which kind of describes a level of the music as well.
There’s some good guitar solos in here, it’s never a dull a moment if you’re the guitarist for Everest Queen. It’s a storytelling approach to guitar playing that is needed for this long form kind of format. It performs well under the pressure of the smaller bursts as well as the endurance of the longer segments. There is a general comfort of everything fitting well across the record, no blemishes.
There’s a lot similarities to the riff progressions found on Leviathan by Mastodon and even a decent amount of Gojira‘s …From Mars to Sirius on the guitar tone and technique. Two albums that fit together really well. What they are doing here isn’t super original but it’s more of what we need right now since the forerunners are either all retired or have gone in a soft white metal sort of direction. So having a solid new death doom band in 2019 makes me happy.
Dead Eden will be in my rotation for a while, it has high replay value. The track Grave Dweller is a consistent standout for me.
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