Last night. I caught Boris, one of my all-time favorite Drone Doom bands, live at the Bowery Ballroom with Michio Kurihara. Without a doubt, it was one of the best concerts I have been to in a good long while. Boris has a massive sound live. My ear filters were put to the test and yet I still went to bed with my ears ringing. I’d never been to the Bowery Ballroom before. It’s a pretty nice place. I spent perhaps a little too much time in the bar downstairs, skipping the opening acts that I didn’t give a fuck about in favor of a good number of Stellas. I ended up with a greasy, green and morbid motherfucker of a hangover this morning because of it. Still, I had a crazy good time head-banging in the middle of a bunch of posers who have no clue about Doom Metal. I love Boris.

As usual, I took a ridiculous amount of photos and uploaded them to a Flickr set. Feel free to check them out.

Lately, I’ve been really getting more and more into Doom Metal, especially Drone Doom and Funeral Doom. I’ve also been going apeshit on Dark Ambient, Experimental and Ambient Noise albums. It’s all great shit to zone to. Here’s some of the albums I’ve snagged off of eMusic this past month that I’m really digging:

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Since I’m still loving eMusic and have been racking new albums every month, I thought I’d list some of the better to best shit I’ve accrued lately.

Electric Wizard is by far one the dopest, heaviest bands around. Their Ozzy-era Black Sabbath-inspired, Stoner/Sludge Doom Metal style is straight-up 70’s era evil psychedelia. It’s loud, chunking and very slow. I have all of their albums and my latest addition, “Come My Fanatics“, is by far their best work and definitely one of the best albums I’ve ever owned in my life. It’s low, slow, evil-hippy vibe makes me want to start wearing denim jackets, grow a fu-manchu, contact Satan and start living out a van (complete with air-brushing). I highly recommend this album.

Boris is a Japanese experimental band who are difficult to place in a genre. Though I only have one of their albums, I’ve read they bounce all over the place with different styles of noise/music. “Absolutego” is one 65-minute long track of ambient noise/Drone Doom filled will slowly plodding bass, buzzing guitars, lotsa feedback and heavy usage of the e-bow. There’s no riffs, melodies or anything. Just ambient guitar noise for over an hour and it’s great. Truly creepy, bad acid trip shit. This is a soundtrack to accompany corpses crawling out of graves. I’m definitely going to check out their other albums.

Similar in style and direction is the band Sunn 0)) (pronounced “Sun” and named after the amplifiers they use). Extremely slow and heavy, using droning, heavily-distorted guitars and sound effects to create a dark, malevolent soundscape, Sunn 0)) are prime examples of Drone Doom. The album “Flight of the Behemoth” is five really long tracks of ambient doom, despair and inscrutable evil. I love these guys. To top it all off, the duo that makes up this band wear evil monk robes whenever they perform live! Could it be cooler?

In fact, I love them so much, I bought another one of their albums, called “The Grimm Robe Demos“. It’s exactly the same kind of shit, which is perfect. Evil, weird, down-tuned and long. Lacking any discernible form or structure, it is music for alien landscapes. That said it’s not for everyone. If you’re not into evil, ambient noise then this music is either going to scare you or give you a headache (or quite possibly both), but if you dig the heavy, creepy shit, you’ll love Sunn 0))) and these two albums.