When I think of Italy, I mostly think of all the great food and doom metal to come from there. Paul Chain is no exception when it comes to absolutely amazing, eccentric doom metal. Paul Chain is an extremely experimental musician who tends to take aspects of the spacey progressive rock (similar to that of the band Goblin, as you'd here in the intro for the album, "Steel Breath") and blend it in with traditional and epic doom metal that isn't as heavy as a band like Candlemass unfortunately, but it's still excellent.
What the music lacks in heaviness, it makes up for it in brilliant progression and just overall great doom metal. Songs like "Antichrist" and "Kill Me" bleed absolute true doom while other songs like "Ancient Caravan" and "My Hills" sound like folk music blended with Black Sabbath. There is a very strong Black Sabbath influence all over this album in the music that meshes together with Paul Chain's melancholic moans and cries to make the epitome of sorrow. The best way to describe the sound on this album would be "traditional epic progressive heavy/doom metal." What a mouthful, eh ladies? The riffs are all pretty slow but they gallop along with the album in a way that keeps you hooked while the vocals are often sung in a way that sounds similar to Messiah Marcolin's epic cries of doom. However, they tend to have some moments where it's quite close to a rough kind of lower vocals that I am not sure what to compare it to.
The experimentation on the album has it all over the place within the genre of doom but it flows together nicely, as contradictory as that sounds. There's influences from traditional doom, epic doom, Black Sabbath and that spacey progressive rock. Paul Chain, is a musical mastermind and is extremely underrated. For shame, world. For shame.
Highlights
"Antichrist"
"My Hills"
"Kill Me"
Final Rating
Awesome [8.9/10]
