Description

Double album on silver vinyls with gatefold cover and two bonus tracks. Limited 200 copies

Once one of, if not the, leading figures in the American doom metal movement of the 80s, Saint Vitus fairly stumbled into the next decade with their sixth full-length album, 1992s C.O.D. (Children Of Doom), which found the original quartet of guitarist Dave Chandler, bassist Mark Adams, and drummer Armando Acosta fighting for their musical lives while breaking in new singer Christian Lindersson, formerly of Sweden’s Count Raven. Of course this would have been no easy task at the best of times, since the departure of longtime frontman Scott Wino Weinrich a few years prior (to re-form his original band, the Obsessed) had left a creative and charismatic void unlikely to be filled by anyone not named Osbourne or Kilmister. This is a rock solid offering of doom that would make the Ozzman and company proud, but apparently not all in their core fan base. This is the most contentious of Saint Vitus offerings, and not without good reason. Although former Count Raven vocalist Christian Lindersson isn’t stylistically all that different from Wino or Reagers, and the band as a whole doesn’t really do anything stylistically out of character on here, the production and the general presentation has taken a dramatic shift that had some crying sellout. While I personally do not share this sentiment, it must be admitted that the resulting product here is a bit closer to Count Raven than what Saint Vitus had become known for on their previous studio endeavours. Whether or not this is seen as a good thing depends largely on how attached one is to the older, muddy and occasionally fuzz steeped atmosphere established and maintained through the duration of the 80s. Im not sure these changes in sound presentation were an experiment for personal artistic enrichment by the band, or an attempt to smoothen things up for wider listening consumption, but the results is yet another fine collection of heavy, down tempo goodness. The riff work is still ground pounding and memorable, though a bit more punchy and less muddy, the vocals still retain a woeful quality, the rhythm section maintains its characteristic looseness in feel in spite of the added clarity of the mix, and Chandler has actually outdone himself in the lead department and put together some of the wildest solos heard in the genre, while remembering the obligatory noise usage and choppy passages that manage to push their way past the slick feel surrounding them. Some of their faster material such as A Screaming Banshee and Imagination Man tend to lose a bit of the punk rock edge typical of Vitus mid 80s work and comes off like a heavier version of Billy Idol, but largely the character of this album lends itself a bit towards an epic sound, albeit without the operatic vocals. Good examples are provided in Planet Of Judgment and Get Away, both of which come oddly close to a Solitude Aeturnus character with something of an outer space-like feel at times in the case of the latter. Generally the riffs are a bit more repetitive, but the somewhat more melodic character of certain sections meshed with the larger sounding atmosphere definitely points it in an epic direction. Ultimately this album seems to be doomed in many quarters, but it does not deserve to be ignored. Sure, there’s a bit of additional guitar tracking on the infectiously catchy title song Children Of Doom, the grooving yet epic Shadow Of A Skeleton and a few other selected works, but it doesn’t steal any of this album’s thunder. People often tend to forget that Sabbath themselves did a good amount of experimentation with their tracking methods, churning out unquestionable classics like Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage. Naturally the technology that makes a clearly defined and somewhat pristine sounding work like this was not available in 1974, but this isn’t really much of a reason to denounce music that takes advantage of the tools of the day. Judging it solely on the merits, apart from any expectations that could possibly be built upon the sonic consistency of the 5 previous albums, this is somewhere between the band’s first two albums in terms of quality. It doesn’t quite reach the raw quality of the debut, but it tends to stick by you a bit longer than the faster and heavily Black Flag influenced Hallows Victim. It’s a worthy pick up, though it will probably appeal to fans of Candlemass a bit more than anything else put out under the Vitus name.

Track listing:
1. Intro
2. Children of Doom
3. Planet of Judgement
4. Shadow of a Skeleton
5. (I Am) The Screaming Banshee
6. Plague of Man
7. Imagination Man
8. Fear
9. Get Away
10. Bela
11. A Timeless Tale
12. Hallows Victim (Exhumed)
13. To Breed A Soldier
14. The Chameleon