Read the review here:

http://www.doom-metal.com/reviews.php?album=3201.

Quite nice to see this band reviewed here=))

Although the album is quite inconsistent (at one time it reminds me of the Mortal Kombat theme song=) there are really great moments and as the reviewer noted the style here is quite unique.

I have the 7" EP released before that which is quite fantastic=))

Btw, recently I noticed that the header parts of the reviews appear too large and quite ugly in Chrome. On Internet Explorer it looks perfectly normal, which means its not a desired effect. Here is how i see the reviews currently:

That'll be where I introduced some new functionality for getting better search engine results. It was fine on all the browsers I tested, but it seems Chrome has issues with automatically updating style sheet changes. Try this fix https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40383732/chrome-not-loading-new-styles-after-css-update.

Fixed, thanks a lot=))

Nice work on the search engine optimization also, I noticed that I haven't got any of the false reroutes lately (or whatever these are called=)))

"Back in 1995, there wasn't such a thing as 'Gothic Doom'. The idea that a Doom band could be influenced by the Post-Punk and Goth Rock scene was, at best, laughable"

Paradise Lost - Gothic 1991
Type O'Negative - Bloody Kisses 1993
There was also the material My Dying Bride and Anathema did back then, some of which at least could be considered Gothic Doom. And more underground bands like Chorus of Ruin (another British Gothic Doom forerunner if things had gone right) and As Serenity Fades. The Gothic Doom gauntlet had been well and truly laid down by 1995.

I had a quick listen to Eterne's debut online. It was an album I really liked at the time. It shows its age nowadays. In particular, I dislike the DI-ed guitar sound (Pre-Line 6 POD). But it doesn't stand up too bad. I might get hold of it again.

Yeah - a pretty ridiculous statement.

Heres some direct quotes from Paradise Lost out of Precious Metal - 25 Extreme Metal Masterpieces - talking about Gothic.





Of course, being from West Yorks myself, I totally agree. Its grim up north. Depressive music comes naturally.

I'm not sure it's completely ridiculous from a European perspective. Probably have to bear in mind that, at the time, the UK scene was a unique mix of influences and the crossovers were often very localised. I'd find it a pretty unjustifiable statement from a Whitby Goth, or a Brighton Levellers/NMA fan, but maybe less so from a guy out in the French sticks with very little but MTV Europe to get the latest news from. It's quite easy, post-internet, to assume this sorta information was widespread and easily-accessible, but the way I remember it at the time was rather different and a lot more obscure! You could have a foot in both camps, certainly - and I did - but it was a helluva balance steering between the denim'n'hair of being any kind of Metal and the black'n'eyeliner of being any sort of Goth...

Well, I was 3 when Gothic came out, so I don't remember the situation at the time (other than that it was definitely fucking rainy and horrible in Halifax, causing local bands to make miserable music as stated ). And I agree, its easy to see this when you have lived your whole life where it all happened. But I still think the Gothic influence on the Peaceville 3 was and is pretty well known.

If I may add my two cents worth...

I'm not sure it would have mattered where you were back then. The music was definitely in existence but I feel the phrase "Gothic Doom" wasn't common place, if at all being used. The Peaceville stuff was usually referred to back then (early/mid nineties) as Death/Doom or simply Doom, which I know will upset the Genre Nazis, who only started gathering any real momentum around the turn of the millenium. I remember buying the early Type O releases and struggling for a definition to give a mate of mine who wanted to borrow them. It wasn't terribly common to hear stuff like that then, the scene was nascent, and hadn't quite had a definitive label slapped on it. That said, despite October Rust being one of my favorite records eva..., I've not been too taken with the realm of Gothic Metal, mainly because it conjures up images of operatic females and blokes with goatees down to their knees who can't sing properly. The music was definitely crossing over in the late eighties and early nineties but the general populace and record companies hadn't really jumped on the terms "Gothic Metal" or "Gothic Doom" until they'd figured out a way to sell MDB, Cradle..., and Type O Negative to a younger, female audience in the mid/late nineties. They reached that particular critical mass with the Pop Goth travesty that was Evanescence.

Yeah, fair point, and one I'd have to agree with.

At this point, I usually refer to the way that Bela Lugosi's Dead became the first 'official' Goth single approximately a year after Bauhaus had released a bunch of albums and then split up - such is the power of retro-fitting labels that simply didn't exist, or weren't considered valid, at the time.

Peaceville then, as I remember it - and I freely admit that was based on a fairly incomplete and fragmented picture based on early MTV cable and Kerrang! - was Death/Doom, and even that was kinda controversial as to what it actually entailed. A metric fucktonne of hindsight, and the much later discovery of US bands like Mindrot, is what really gave it the retrospective 'it's obviously Gothic' tag. It was simply a different world pre-Wiki (etc), and it's kind of hard to explain just how much perceptions and post-hoc rationalisations shifted during that period.

Though I am fairly certain Evanescence, terrible and consummate label-product as they were, never really plumbed the depths of Epica's sub-Therion awfulness. That was my personal "Dear God, enough!" moment of Gothic Metal realisation

I agree that the tag "gothic doom" wasn't common at all around 1995. Back then, I did listen to the Peaceville prods, and to me, this was "death doom", and even this bastard tag sounded rather exotic! In my vocabulary, "Gothic" was only used to describe the coldwave/batcave scene.

The fact is that there's a confusion in the reviewer's phrasing: if the label "gothic doom" didn't really exist, as a genre- encompassing one that is, the music itself was indeed starting to be produced, and in retrospect, you can now indentify some albums that could be linked to the style. The confusion lies in the choice of words imo:

Back in 1995, there wasn't such a thing as 'Gothic Doom' should be read as
Back in 1995, there wasn't such a thing as a 'Gothic Doom' label

Now time for Laurent to come and explain his stance...

Wasn't the album called Gothic a clue?
I don't know, you old folks and your lack of splitting metal into a million subgenres. How on earth did you decide what not to like? Did you have to listen to it?

Not really (although I do notice the tongue-in-cheek comment ). Back then, it couldn't be reasonably seen as an attempt at genre-defining.

Well, I always thought of them as Gothic Metal... this is was they were to me... like early Tiamat... those bands were a natural progression for me, an old goth at heart in the previous years...

Gothic doom to me has always been stuff like Draconian... but then, their first album was in 2003, so fairly late...

I've only been listening to "doom" for the last 13 years, so not as experienced as some of you...

Doom came to me in 1994 with Eternal Frost, a song off the album was aired on some Belgian radio late at night... I was like...

I was heavily into grunge at that time... and just discovered Tiamat's Wildhoney... and Type O Negative's Bloody Kisses... 2 real WTF moments for me too...

That Winter song I'm talking about, I must have heard it before '94. Not too sure... But before that date, I was actively chasing all Hellhound records anyway. Grunge, it never clicked with me, except for Soundgarden. I liked more fusion stuff, like Primus and Faith No More...

Nah... hated Faith No More... I was also into more alternative American indie stuff, like Sebadoh, Dinosaur Jr, Pixies, Lemonheads, Pavement, Sonic Youth, Yo La Tengo, Flaming Lips, Bitch Magnet and shit like that... with a a touch of Tool and Helmet...

Yeah. If we could even find a copy to listen to



Honest to God, I have absolutely no idea when I became a "Doom fan". Perhaps the end of the '70s when I was first buying Sabbath albums. Maybe '86, when I got my first (yes, vinyl) copy of 'Epicus', maybe '92/'93 when I first heard MDB. Maybe turn of the century with Draconian and random pickups like Mindrot. But I guess I only really became aware of the actual structure and hierarchy of Doom when I started writing here back in 2011 - before that I had plenty of both Trad and Extreme Doom albums, but no real idea how or where they were linked.
So I genuinely don't know whether I should proclaim myself as one of the 'old guard' who was hip to it before it was even a thing - or had a generally-accepted name - or a more modern dilettante who came late to 'the scene' and has been blagging it ever since
Any advice gratefully received

Well, don't know about you belonging to the old guard or not, but you are certainly OLD!
Now that we can officially boast about our very own Great Old One, I guess noone can deny the legitimacy of this site and its place in the Doom mythology.