Slow, easy motion is pervasive here and this pacing is likely going to be a virtue for the stoner/doom crowd but probably a bit plain if you dabble in traditional doom metal for its inventive side. That said the lead guitars provide quite a lot of additional shaping and interest to these otherwise repetitive, drone-engrossed pieces which average 10-15 minutes each. If we zip over to ‘Jerusalem’ part three or so, that is basically the Crypt Monarch sound in terms of vocal placement, ritualistic presentation, and hazed over sound design. The vocals are distant and usually layered for dimensional effect, one vocalist at the pulpit with a distorted bass in hand and another a few feet back with a deeper bellow cutting through.

The gist of their sound is early 90’s Sleep and the raw sort of Black Bow Records kind of sound, near the point of speaker explosion but without all of the bells and whistles that might imply otherwise. San José, Costa Rica-based “necromantik” stoner doom metal trio Crypt Monarch introduce themselves as exactly this sort of honest, raw and rugged real-time entity on their debut full-length ‘ The Necronaut‘ a three act trip through this jammed-out and weathered artform detailing a jilted king’s zombie reprisal and vengeance.įormed in mid-2020 from folks you’ll recognize from Age of the Wolf, Dilapidated Mechanism, Redhead Match and VoidOath the trio here isn’t an unexpected collaboration in terms of the artists involved but ‘The Necronaut’ is a far more traditional take on stoner/doom metal than anything else they’ve put out in various other projects. Reveal all of the raw guts hanging out, strip thy self of studio skin and there it becomes less a sport of amplifier worship and more a profound challenge of movement - sweaty marijuana-enhanced action dependent on songwriting -and- swagger. As we push to all manner of extremes and warped noodling to exhaust the generative possibilities it only sinks in deeper that doom metal is by design a living, breathing act of syncopation atop the very bones of what tradition it is birthed from and there is no greater test of a relatively unknown band than to simplify the wrack to a minimal, droning purity. In congress with the heavily impaired, sausage-fingered drawl of slow-motion blues the “horror through the walls” of ancient garage-jammed doom metal has had its stupid fangs in my neck since, I dunno, somewhere in between ‘Master of Reality’ releasing on CD and the live record from Saint Vitus. The blunt roar and heat-excited ringing of an overworked and under-maintained amplifier fizzling under the pressure of fuzz and whatever outrageous, claustrophobia-inducing growl thee guitarist can manage via stomped-on effects is an separate extreme, a sub-genre of anti-tone far beyond the genius of the Sabbath groove.

Crypt of the ancients