ninehertz

There’s a wizard in a cloud of smoke on the cover and the EP title is Dope Druid. You don’t need me to tell you what this sounds like. Sometimes you can be mistaken, prematurely pigeonholing a band before listening only to be have it shoved back in your face. But not here. Konung’s music is exactly as it appears.

Think of every doom trope going, it’ll be here, thrown in with abandon and championed unashamedly. The whole affair starts with a Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula sample followed by base doom riff and effect dulled vocals, before simply leaning on it and its pure tone. The first words spoken are “inhale the green smoke”. For all you may detect weariness or sarcasm in my introductory words, I can’t deny that it is a satisfying experience.

There’s a track about werewolves, I think, replete with Conan armoured hammer riff, and another, Tsar of Blood, about Dracula, which is happy to ride its riff into a wall of repetition, entering doom/psych mind-altering territories in a Slomatics manner. It is easily the best of the three here.

If any genre can get away with this unironic approach to the fundamental cliches of its scene then it is doom; its fans have become conditioned to expect and accept as much, the music lends itself to repetition so why not include revisionism in the same manner? The main barometer, regardless, will always be the music, and Konung know their way around a riff which makes for a seriously heavy and ultimately fun EP.