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Camel of Doom – Terrestrial – Album Review

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Camel of Doom
Terrestrial
Solitude Productions
Release Date: 8 February 2016
Review by Alex Sievers

Camel of Doom may very well be the funniest band name I have heard to date, and considering that they are a doom metal band, the humor is not lost on me. Apparently, this trio from the UK have been around for 15 years. 15 damn years and this is first I’ve heard of this band with such a glorious name? The music industry is failing, I tells ya!

Anyway, Terrestrial is eight songs of slow, crushing, droning, drawn-out doom metal. It really is the musical equivalent of Requiem for A Dream and Schindler’s List in terms of how bloody heavy it is. It’s incredibly dynamic in its instrumentation, and is very dense in terms of the musical layers going on within this grand soundscape that we call Camel of Doom’s fourth album to date.

If all that sounds like fun to you, then hey, more power to you, but for us mortals living in sensible world, having four out of these eight songs last longer than eleven minutes (one is just at the fifteen-minute mark, for Christ’s sake) seriously starts to bog one down. Terrestrial just felt like one long song, and sometimes, it actually was one long f*cking song. This is just like Return of the King – when you think it’s about to end, it just keeps going!

But if I quit my bitching for a moment, it’s a damn good long song at that, but in an album that’s over an hour long, I found that this just became quite tedious after only Pyroclastic Flow, which is only three tracks in. Now, of course you can just say that I just ‘Don’t get it,’ or maybe that I lack the attention span for this sort of music, and hey, maybe you’d be right, but I can definitely appreciate good music when I hear it.

And this is some damn good music. Trust me. But while I really liked this album, despite the never-ending nature of its structure, I am so torn on it that I can only recommend this to die-hard doom metal fans.

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