Album Review: Serpentine Path - Serpentine Path

The last pair of Electric Wizard albums have been close to unfaultable. Those psychedelic riffs and vintage tones and Jus Oborn's mammothly stoned singing voice made for some of the best doom metal songs in a long time. But as good as Witchcult Today and Black Masses are, they sometimes leave you wanting some of the more caustic death-influenced doom found on Wizard's older records like Come My Fanatics… or Dopethrone. Serpentine Path, the latest group featuring Electric Wizard's ex-drummer Tim Bagshaw and the three members of New York doom crew Unearthly Trance, take the formula of those classic records and run with it on their self-titled debut LP.

Perhaps run is a misnomer though; they walk, stagger, trudge along with the formula, weighed down by the ungodly heaviness of their arsenal of riffs. Efforts like Crotalus Horridus Horridus have the quartet pushing the songs towards funeral dirge slowness, the buzz of tube amplifiers and crash of cymbals seeming to hang in the air for an eternity before the next note comes along to pummel you. It's powerful stuff, even when the band up the tempo a little bit they sacrifice none of their foreboding heaviness. Though they only formed the band last year, when these guys lock into a groove they sound like they've been doing slow, misanthropic death/doom together for decades.

Though their name isn't being bandied around doom metal circles yet, and for this album the band will probably be discussed more for the previous credits of its members, this self-titled banger is going to make Serpentine Path a major part of the conversation regarding modern doom metal.