Acid Mammoth : "Supersonic Megafauna Collision'

 

Wanted to check out some new doom, so here we are with Greece's Acid Mammoth, a band whose fuzz is getting a bit of a buzz. The first song made me wonder about things when the vocals came in. Are doom bands these days thinking "You know if the singer did not belt it out as much we might sound a little like Ghost?" 

Makes sense, Ghost sells a ton of records. If you are used to imitating Ozzy, then your brassy tenor just needs a little less balls behind it and you sound almost like Poppa Smerfitus. They have listened to a few parts of Sabbath albums for sure, and the bands who took influence from them in recent years. They dialed down the tone, now the key for me and these guys is to ask who they are? What is their personality or are they just a tribute to a sound?  "Garden of Bones" sounds like the first attempt at really trying to answer this as they lean into a darker atmosphere. 

My ears are drawn back to the vocals that are high in the mix, and it makes me realize there is also not a huge leap from sounding like Lil Poppa from Ghost to sounding like Weird Al Yankovic. It's the brightness of the tenor. With Ozzy, he has a more mournful meow to his voice, that keeps things darker. The guitar plays some darker passages here, but the vocals being so bright, make it seem less heavy. Which is the same problem I have with Ghost. And yet Ozzy is one of my favorite singers. When they pick up the pace on "Atomic Shaman" it helps but I am still not really blown away. 

They needed the acoustic guitar going into "One With the Void" as everything was beginning to sound the same. The vocals are still a little Ghostly, but it's given a better backdrop to contrast it. I guess if Ghost was covering Black Sabbath's eponymous title track it might sound like the last song of this album, though its pulse also feels a little Zeppelin when it comes to the drums. I will round this down to an 8, as it's a doom album that does not sound all that dark to me, but they are good at the sound they have captured here, even if nothing new is being brought to the table. 

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