Category: Reviews

Doom is the music of the self alone in the dark. It sits with grief and holds it, slow and low. Twice before, a recorded voice entered one of their songs, a man who looked at his own death and called it a plain ending. Circadian Promise brings in a different voice, one that says the self is part of everything around it, that what you fear losing dissolves back into the whole it came from. A new singer arrives to carry it, and the band that kept to the ground begins to rise.

The third album from the Halifax doom band closes a trilogy built on the language of light, and hands its songs from one singer to the next. Strong, heavy and varied, with a handful of moments that lift above the rest.

Litúrgia’s debut album, I, delivers six tracks of Catalan epic doom from Barcelona, sung entirely in their native tongue and rooted in the mythology and landscape of Catalonia. The band perform in hooded pilgrim robes and call themselves the Pilgrim Order of Holy Fear. The model for what they are doing is older than doom metal: Romanesque art, made to teach legends and scripture to a congregation that could not read.