siLLy puPPy Lured in by the strange and garlanded goat on the painting titled “Witches' Sabbath” by Francisco Goya which adorns the album cover, REVEREND BIZARRE continues the thrills and chills of dramatic traditional doom metal following in the footsteps of Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus and Pentagram. Their strategy is simple. Keep it slow, keep a fuzzed out hypnotic guitar tone and only speed things up occasionally to break the spell only long enough to take you to the next hypnotizing and atmospheric track.

What really works for me with this depressive sonicscape of gloom and doom is the brilliant dramatic vocal preaching of Magister Albert Witchfinder and his distorted low frequencies with the slow burning, behemoth guitar riffage of Peter Vicar. The creeping death slowness drumming of Earl Of Void completes this Unholy Trinity (what they called themselves) delivering some of the most intense impending dreadful sounding doom metal that I can think of.

Overall, this is a really wicked sound that I love but I think that the album would have been better off with a shorter running track. By the time I get to the sprawling 21:09 minute closer “Cirith Ungol” I feel sufficiently doom and gloomed out and that track doesn't add any new ideas to the otherwise sufficiently long album. That said, this is a great album and despite the length I really dig the sound and feel of the whole thing.

Warthur Question: just how slow can traditional doom metal get and still be recognisably traditional, Sabbath-inspired doom metal of the Candlemass/Electric Wizard variety as opposed to drone metal? The answer, as it turns out, is pretty damn slow indeed, as Reverend Bizarre prove on their debut album. But the Reverend should not be mistaken for advocates of slowness for the sake of slowness - their compositions do occasionally kick into gear, and it's a great deal of fun when they do so. The long, languid, glacier-like slow sections in their compositions are integral to evoking the atmosphere of lethargic melancholy they require, and they summon it masterfully.

Buyers may wish to note that most recent CD issues of In the Rectory include as a bonus the EP Return to the Rectory - in fact, for a long while this was the only way to get a copy of Return to the Rectory, until it finally got a standalone vinyl release in 2011. But I'll review that one on its own page when I come to it. As for the main event itself, it's an absolute classic of traditional doom metal, standing as proof that masters such as Candlemass, Solitude Aeturnus, Electric Wizard and good old Black Sabbath themselves hadn't yet explored all the possibilities of the subgenre.