BLOOD CEREMONY — Living With the Ancients (review)

BLOOD CEREMONY — Living With the Ancients album cover Album · 2011 · Traditional Doom Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Phonebook Eater
6/10

"Living With The Ancients" is a decent vintage Doom Metal album, but not as good as the hype suggests.

It’s nice to hear some good vintage doom metal every once in a while. Blood Ceremony, from Canada, have released back in 2008 a very obscure album that nobody seemed to notice. This year, they’re receiving much more attention, thanks to “Living With The Ancients”. The story here is very similar to many bands out there right now in 2011 that are getting acclaimed, to name one Appearance Of Nothing, whose album I just reviewed.

Blood Ceremony is, in a way, the most original band out there right now. In another way, this band is just as banal and unoriginal as a pair of dirty sox. That’s because we’ve heard this type of music so many times that our ears will bleed if we hear to another hard rock/proto metal band. But not in 2011, a very experimental and avant-garde year in music in my opinion. Basically, the sound of the band has huge influences of those proto metal/ hard rock bands from the seventies, especially the most heavy ones (an obvious hats off to Black Sabbath), but also some folkish influences, thanks to the massive use of the flute (this time, a hats off to Jethro Tull and Ian Anderson) along the album. There is also, along with the vintage guitars and all the other mentioned stuff, an organ very used to give a more powerful and full sound to the music. The most distinctive element though is most definitely the female vocals by Alia O’Brien ( hoping I’m writing that correctly). So I find it pretty hard to define this type of music metal, having such strong roots to the past.

Even from the lyrical point of view the band is heavily influenced by Black Sabbath; songs about dark magic, Satanic rituals, witches and such. There is though more interest in the pagan world than in Iommi’s band, like the title of the title can suggest. I have to admit that I wasn’t crazy for many songs; too unoriginal, not that I don’t like vintage retro music, but I find it a little boring if it is done with insistency, like this type of music is. Excellent highlights can be found in the gripping and hypnotizing “The Great God Pan”, “My Demon Brother”, and the final ten minute “Daughter Of The Sun”. There are a few filler songs, but I don’t mind them like many do. There is one short instrumental, “The Hermit”, which didn’t grab my attention particularly. In fact, some of the songs here, like “Night Of The Augury” or “Morning Of The Magicians”, I just don’t find that appealing, but that just taste.

In fact, I don’t really have anything bad to say about this album; it’s just that I didn’t like it for pure and simple personal reasons. It can happen to feel like that for an album.
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