LP Review: "Grotesque Offerings" by Druid Lord

Grotesque Offerings

My favorite thing about metal is how absolutely different one band can be from the next.

The various metal subgenres definitely get their fair, and unfair, share of sand kicked in their faces.

But picture Grunge...Stone Temple Pilots and Soundgarden weren't really all that different from each other.

(Come at me, Grungebunnies.)

When metal is considered (Fight me, Kim Thayil!), the lines that delineate what is and is not metal are far more blurred. Is Deep Purple metal?

Zeppelin? Sabbath? What about Kiss?

Then when you get into what individual metal fans like. There are folks I know that are as metal as the day is long on the Summer Solstice, but wouldn't ever consider listening to Carcass, Mayhem, or Fisthammer.

Druid Lord

The various types of metal are as diverse as the people who listen to them. That's truly something that no other genre of music has.

What if there was a band that was peopled with musicians who held very different views as to what metal is?

Perhaps you've got a guitarist who's very much into the fuzzed out tones of Black Sabbath. Then put him together with a singer who thinks that Scandinavian black metal vocals can be used in another genre of music, but like all great metal bands he also plays bass.

So, he's calm and rational there just following the other gents into the great unknown.

What about this drummer who can't always contain himself? He wants to play death metal, but he's cool with keeping it mellow a lot of the time, until those beats just pop out..blast off?

Then you have the lead guitarist. Well, we all know what those guys are like. They're ready to pop off all over the tracks when you give them half a look....and he does...wonderfully so.

In fact, if anything he was shackled down a bit and we could've used a bit more of his demonic melodies.

Taking this group of sounds and melding them into a pot. What in the world do you call it?

Druid Lord has sounds from the four corners of metal: Doom, Death, Traditional, and Thrash.

So, naturally, this is a doom metal record because it's not played at a thousand miles an hour the entire time. In the end, Druid Lord opens a door...

Who's ready to enter?

Release: 1/19/18
Genre: Metal
Label: Hell's Headbangers
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