By Monk
This compilation album does exactly what it says in the title. It is the latest in a series of compilation albums focussing attention on the doom and stoner scenes in various locations around the Überverse, with previous editions having profiled both emergent and established acts in the likes of The Netherlands, Russia (both of whom have scenes so active they’ve actually both had two compilations dedicated to their territories), Belgium, Greece, various quadrants of the Ünited States, Australia and even Peru, as well as England and Wales. Now, with this iteration, the curators have turned their collective attention to last of the once independent kingdoms of Great Britain, heading north of the border to the land of Alba to find out what is going on there…
And the answer, as if we needed telling, is quite a lot, as this compilation pulls together a highly impressive 40 acts, covering the full gamut of the doom/stoner mien, from psyche-tinged spaced-out hard rock through to heavy sludginess so full of muck and grime you’ll be cleaning your speakers out for a week after the first listen, taking myriad detours along the way, demonstrating once again that no genre should really be tied to preconceived, or pre-construed, strictures but instead have the freedom to breath and stretch its limit to its fullest creative extent while still remaining true to its underlying ethos.
Some of the acts will be familiar to aficionados of the genre – Iron Claw have been plying their trade for 50+ years, while Headless Kross are one of the modern era’s most respected purveyors of heavy psych-infused doom, and the likes of King Witch, Bacchus Baracus, Iron Altar and Hair Of The Dog have very much found their stars in the ascendancy in recent years. But, of course, one of the beauties of a compilation such as this is that it features a host of previously unfamiliar talent, such as Dog Tired, with their deathly twist on the genre, the (appropriately) Tull-ish folk/prog/trad inflections of Sloth Metropolis and Solar Sons, the beguiling jauntiness of Juniper Grave, the swampy grunt of the returning Bisongrass, the intoxicating fuzzed-out ferocity of Isak, the suitably dense melancholia of Psychotic Depression…
To be honest, I could keep working my through this extensive and impressive playlist, but it seems hardly fair to highlight some bands and (with a few exceptions which left me muttering “meh” and moving on) not others… Overall, as I said at the beginning, this extremely worthy compilation does exactly what it does in the title, and is an invaluable sample of the scene which it highlights: it also does a much better job of lightening the doom (sic) of the last couple of months of lockdown than both yer man with the Trump-esque haircut and yer woman who looks like she’s been slapped in the gob with a pickled herring…
- ‘Doomed & Stoned in Scotland’ is available as a “name your price” download HERE.
- You can explore the rest of the Doomed & Stoned collection HERE.
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