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 Reverend Bizarre's final album is presented in that most dangerous of formats: a 2CD double album with each CD crammed with over an hour of music. Few bands can sustain a consistent level of quality across the space of such a long album without letting filler slip in here and there, but Reverend Bizarre manage to pull it off; even better, their flirtation with shorter and more commercial song formats on Crush the Insects seems to have been dropped in favour of the epic approach of their debut album. (Ironically, this seems to have resulted in their greatest commercial success, with a 16 minute edit of the opening track hitting number 1 in the Finnish single charts!)

This swansong for the band sees them at their most inventive - perhaps the most surprising feature being the use of synthesisers to add a Byzantine texture to the outro of Caesar Forever - and stands alongside the classic In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend as a monument to a brilliant and all too short-lived band.

Warthur Reverend Bizarre worked on a lot of material in the course of planning their next album - releasing, in the process of doing so, the Harbinger of Metal and Return to the Rectory EPs, both of which were as long as full-length albums but were relegated to EP status because the band weren't satisfied with them. To be honest, I think they did Harbinger of Metal a bit of a disservice, because it seems to me to have the edge on Crush the Insects, but Crush is a perfectly decent album in its own right. Leading off with two uncharacteristically up-tempo numbers for the band, it soon reverts to their usual super-slow doom metal mode. Not a classic on the scale of its predecessor, but far from an embarrassment.

Warthur Reverend Bizarre originally recorded this one in 2004, decided it wasn't good enough for a stand alone release, and slapped it onto a reissue of In the Rectory as a bonus disc - despite the fact that fits neatly onto a double LP album.

It took a while for the material here to grow on me, mostly because the mainline Reverend Bizarre albums are just that good - that's their legendary quality control for you. That said, I wasn't going to toss my copy away - because I got it as a bonus disc with my copy of In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend - and after some repeated listens this begins to show some deeper charms. Beneath the traditional doom stylings here there's some esoteric psychedelic influences that creep in on Goddess of Doom, for instance, or even some jazzy playing that emerges on Aleister, and other such stylistic experiments which really enrich proceedings. For all their rhetoric about the purity of Doom Metal, Reverend Bizarre secretly understand that Sabbath were considered a progressive band in their time, and had a broader sonic range than they are given credit for, and so working in some rather progressive playing is all in the spirit of good doom.

Warthur When you put out 74 minutes of music on a CD, most of the time you call it an album. Not so Reverend Bizarre, who chose to describe Harbinger of Metal as an EP. I suspect this is part of the band's painstaking devotion to quality, refusing to ascribe the album status to only their most significant efforts. Whatever you call it, Harbinger of Metal is still a very respectable doom metal album - perhaps not as monumental as In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend, but still a top-notch doom piece, particularly for its brilliant cover of Burzum's Dunkelheit which manages to both capture the spirit of the original and stay true to the band's doomy approach at the same time.