For a while in the late nineties, the stoner rock sound became a defining template of heavy music. Take Sabbath style riffs, pepper in a bit of Kyuss, and then try to add some kind of original filler to the whole recipe. A few bands nailed it, others were like watching paint dry. Regardless, the recipe was passed on from band to band, and the template became repetitive to a point that you could anticipate a band’s sound just by looking at them.
In the modern age of heavy music, Doom-Metal has replaced stoner rock. Black Sabbath has been replaced with Sleep, and Kyuss has been traded out for Eyehategod and High On Fire. The effect is still the same. A template has been created that band after band after band use to try and stake their claim. It’s to the point that even the bands who do it well elicit a decided feeling of “oh God this again”.
Bringing us to Conan, and their latest release Blood Eagle. This album marks the band’s third full length, and the first for Napalm Records. Overall, Blood Eagle is a solid album of chunky riffs, molasses-slow tempos, and loud, wizard-of-the-night style vocals. Conan have a created a brew of music that lives up to their name. Heavy, aggressive, striking, desolate, menacing, all the things you’d expect for a band named after an ass-kicking barbarian.
If the template of modern doom-metal still interests you, then Conan do it better than most. When slowing everything down, most bands tend to sacrifice textures for pure sludge. Conan doesn’t fall into that trap, so each song manages to carve out its own niche, instead of sounding like one long song that grows less interesting by the minute. Conan also have a strong sense of dynamics, which can be missing in doom-metal. The songs build to crescendos, and have cathartic releases. The structures are reliant on both the thick guitar distortion and the grimy bass sound. Rather than having one support the structure, and the other play off of it, both guitar and bass trade off the responsibilities.
While Conan avoid many of the trappings that befall doom-metal bands, they are not immune to all of them. The most egregious is song length. When the entire basis of your song is the repetition of parts, and the slow drive of a sludge tempo, expanding the tunes into and average length of seven to eight minutes is a mistake. Three quarters of the songs on Blood Eagle would benefit from shaving a minute to two minutes off the running time. Lengthy instrumental sections that go nowhere drag down the overall effectiveness of the jams, and often kill the energy of a tune that’s already fairly slow.
It is impossible to fault Conan for this, since it is all part of the template. Doom-Metal songs are supposed to go on forever. The bands are expected to try and turn every song into an epic, or at least the soundtrack to some kind of D&D battle. Conan are a talented bunch of guys, so they fluff the template up into something enjoyable. If you love every band doom-metal hurls at you, Conan stand head and shoulders above the rest. If you’re tired of the genre, then you’ll find aspects of Blood Eagle entertaining, but with too many touchstones of doom-metal to achieve complete interest.
