Dread Sovereign – Alchemical Warfare

For years, Primordial has been one of those bands that people tell me I should check out. Specifically, they’ve been described as “a black metal band you’ll actually enjoy”. How kind that my friends take my pickiness with this corpsepainted genre into consideration. Anyways, while I still have yet to check out Primordial, today I’m checking out their frontman’s other band, Dread Sovereign.

This occult themed supergroup features Primordial’s Nemtheananga handling both bass and vocal duties, veteran guitarist Bones, and Conan drummer Con Ri. Together, these three specialize in a crushing brand of doom metal, with plenty of nods to the traditional 80s metal sound. By no means is Alchemical Warfare a retro sounding record, but the retro influences are present.

The album begins promising. The riffs are gigantic, Nemtheananga’s vocals rip, and there’s an all around epic atmosphere that lies somewhere between Cirith Ungol and Atlantean Kodex. However, these first few tracks lack the depth of the bands just listed. They’re rather one dimensional and don’t do much aside from take up space. By the time I got to the frantic “Nature is the Devil’s Church”, I was starting to dread (no pun intended) the rest of my listening experience.

Thankfully, this is now the second album of the year where the second half is considerably stronger than the first (see Death Kommander’s Pro Patria Mori). The upswing begins with my choice cut, “Her Master’s Voice”. Wino anyone? The blues doom scorcher screams Saint Vitus and The Obsessed, while Nemtheananga delivers a vocal that’d make Robert Plant go “Damn!” Other tracks of note include the Dio era Sabbath flair of “Devil’s Bane” and an outright unrelenting rendition of Bathory’s “You Don’t Move Me (I Don’t Give a Fuck)”.

Now that I’ve got a good idea of what Dread Sovereign is about, I’m going to have to check out the rest of their catalog, as well as that of their ferocious frontman. So here’s the part where I leave a 1-10 rating and you bugger off so I can explore new music.

6 out of 10

Label: Metal Blade Records

Genre: Doom Metal

For fans of: Saint Vitus, Dio era Black Sabbath, Cirith Ungol