Album Details

• Artist: Monarch
• EP:
Omens
• Label: At A Loss
• Year of Release: 2012
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: patchen on 2012-04-28

With many Doom bands, the vocals tend to bring down the music, or are at best tolerated for the sake of the drone. The growling has been done too often to really work anymore, and there is enough real horror in the world to make angry screeching seems silly. With Monarch, however, it is often the raging vocals that elevate these tracks into rarified air. T

he three song "Omens" is one of the French Doom/Drone band's releases, and as solid as any in a particularly great spring for Doom. "Blood Seeress" opens the EP with celestial, deliberate drone, with Emile Bresson's vocals beleivably tortured in the mid section. The epic, nineteen minute "Black Becomes The Sun" employs both atmospheric drone with crushing doom with again, most of the emotional intensity provided by Bresson's intense, soulful vocals. It serves as a massive, emphatic closer with the band at a peak. In comparison, the middle track "Transylvanian Incantations" a more or less straight on ambient drone, it's almost soothing tone is jarring in context, a lull that might be more powerful without its placement between two huge rockers.

Their first record in five years, "Omens" is a forty minute missive from the mountaintop of Doom. Monarchs provide hot, sludgy droning rock that does not rewrite the genre, but, especially with the vocals, adds a different, powerful take on it.

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