Time Signature In the name of rock 'n' roll...

Genre: traditional doom metal

It's heavy. It's dense. It's repetitive. It's old-fashioned. It's Swedish. It's Count Raven. It's f*cking great.

When I was in the underground thrash metal band, Erector, I listened quite extensively to "Storm Warning", and the other guys in the band used to laugh at it because it was slow, the riffage often simple and the singer had a strange nasal voice. I didn't care, because those were exactly things that I loved about this album. I still love them.

I love this old traditional style of doom metal, and "Storm Warning" is one of my all time favorites. Most of the riffage is simple, perhaps, but very captivating and melancholic. Compared to newer doom metal, the music on this album may not seem slow and heavy, but it is still heavy and doom-ladden. Tracks like "True Revelation", "In the Name of Rock 'n' Roll", and "Within the Garden of Mirrors" are just captivating and soul-torturing, and I love how their main riffs are just constantly repeated.

One of the things that my band mates at the time laughed the most at was Christian Lindersson's strange nasal voice and vocal lines. As it happens, I really love Lindersson's work on this album. His voice may be strange, but it's so very expressive. It has been described as being Ozzy-like, but, to my ears it isn't - Fondelius, who would take over as vocalist after Lindersson joined St. Vitus, sounds much more like Ozzy; needless to say, I like Lindersson better, because he sounds original.

Count Raven have received credit for writing socially conscious texts, which was unusual in most doom metal at the time, which dealt more with either psychological topics like depression and sorrow or horror/fantasy related topics. I do like the lyrical themes of "Storm Warning" although it's weird to hear anti-glam metal lyrics to such a melancholic riff as the main riff of "In the name of Rock 'n' Roll" - on the other hand, anti-glam was extremely metal at the time, and I really like the imagery of the lyrics, and how Lindersson ends up blaming the messed u state-of-affairs in the world on glam metal posers.

This is a doom metal classic. Buy it!

Time Signature A lifetime...

Genre: doom metal

This is good old fashioned doom metal, harkening back to the pre-death doom days. "Mammons War" is the first Count Raven album since 1996, and it is certainly an effort they can be proud of. We are dealing with a solid and stylistically album here which, although it has not made the same impression on me as "Storm Warning" did, I enjoy listening to.

"Mammons War" was, on more than one occasion, reminds me a lot of Black Sabbath. One reason is, of course, that Dan Fondelius sounds a lot (too much, I think) like Ozzy Osbourse, and a lot of the riffage is also reminiscent of Tony Iommi's style. I wouldn't write this album off as a clone of early Sabbath though. Firstly, it has a very modern sound - compared to Sabbath; compared to present-day doom metal, it has a very retro sound - which is one of the things I really like about it. That being said, the bass sound (check out "Seven Days" for instance) is pretty much copied from Geezer Butler... but let us consider it a tribute rather than a rip-off, shall we? Secondly, "Mammons War" is nowhere as blues- and jazz-derived as Sabbath's early stuff was, and is more straightforward with less stylistic interplay.

While I like this album for what it is - good old fashioned retro sounding doom metal - I am afraid that some younger fans might find it boring and monotonous, especially long tracks like "The Entity", "A Lifetime", and "Seven Days". The thing is that Count Raven's approach is more minimalistic than the more epic sounding Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus, and thus, I can imagin that some might find a really long track which onle makes use of a handful of different riffs a bit hard to listen to. That being said, the long tracks are my favorite tracks of the album, because of the sheer heaviness (especially, "Seven Days" is a wonderfully mesmerizingly minimalistic heavy track); and being brought into an almost trance-like state is, I would argue, one of the most cherished doom metal experiences one can have (the other one is being brought to tears through the melancholy created musically; "Mammons War" is not likely to do that to me).

I would recommend this album to fans of old school pre-doom/death doom metal and also to the younger fans who are interested in old school doom metal. I think that fans of My Dying Bride and early Cathedral will appreciate some of the tracks on this album, such as "Seven days" and "A Lifetime". Although this is not a sludgy album, I think that some fans of sludge metal might like it too.