Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine - Rampton (2002)

After all of the "super sonic martian disco" bullshit that Cathedral has dribbled fourth like an unceremonious bout of diarrhea over the past 20 or so years, it's absolutely mindblowing to me that Lee Dorrian still has what it takes to lay down some monumentally devastating doom such as he had with this album.

Bear in mind that one of these tracks is one of those Sunno)))-esque mindless drone fests that bore me to fucking insanity. Although not as agonizingly sparse, it may or may not begin to wear thin on your nerves depending on your endurance level. The other two, however, are prime cuts of some of the most bone crushingly crepitus doom I've had the pleasure to experience. Dorrian sounds deliciously vile here in a way that he hasn't since Cathedral's ungodly debut, 1991's 'Forest of Equilibrium'. The music here is similarly paced but the flesh of this particular behemoth is suitably more rotted and decayed.

When he's not noodling around with a million pseudo-intellectual drone/ambient/noise fart fests, Stephen O'Malley can actually come up with some thunderous doom for your ass as he has previously done in Thorr's Hammer and Burning Witch. In many ways, TOLRTD is sort of the logical continuation down the path blazed by the aforementioned duo. I know that some websites persist on labeling TOLRTD everything from 'drone' to 'stoner', but for me, this album has more in common with the death/doom genre if anything.

The drum patterns are kept interesting by Iron Monkey/Electric Wizard kit-master, Justin Greaves. One of the main problems with most doom bands is that the percussive dynamics are usually kept to a bare minimum, which is something that has never sat well with me. I've found that some of the more busier drummers out there have done little to nothing in hindering the overall power and dread atmosphere created by the guitars and other instruments. Evoken is a prime example of this. Despite this minimalism of the material found here, Greaves keeps the tempo interesting, which keeps some of the more droning material on this album from becoming a total endurance test.

I'm not sure what exactly the status of TOLRTD is or whether or not they are even a legitimate band beyond this particular album, but I would be thrilled beyond capacity if they were to usher fourth any more material as this is the kind of doom that I enjoy most, not to mention the fact that this is the best that Lee Dorrian has sounded since 1991.