Fear, Emptiness, Decibel: Skepticism’s Stormcrowfleet Inducted Into The Hall of Fame!
Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…
You ever wonder why Soundgarden named their third album Badmotorfinger? I don’t have the answer (Google is surprisingly inconclusive), but it would’ve made more sense if they were Finnish. Consider influential funeral doom forefathers Skepticism, whose 1995 debut, Stormcrowfleet, is the subject of the April issue’s Hall of Fame.
“Combining words like ‘storm-crow-fleet’ is a typical thing for the Finnish language, but less so in English,” says keyboardist Eero Pöyry. “The crow has been an important bird for me … I wanted a word that conjured something larger than a flock of crows, and that’s where ‘Fleet’ came in. ‘Storm,’ well, this one is the least surprising. As a combination, I wanted something powerful and significant.”
To suggest that Skepticism accomplished that would be a massive understatement. Stormcrowfleet unpacks six crushingly depressive epics, and quite the unconventional setup: Pöyry moved from guitar to church organ, supplementing a foundation predominantly built upon Jani Kekarainen’s melancholic, glacial riffage. “Sign of a Storm” hooks you the moment those haunting sustained notes emerge from the ether.
As of right now, it looks like Stormcrowfleet is going to be the preeminent funeral doom platter honored in the Hall. Obviously, it places a very close second to the genre’s big bang, Thergothon’s immortal suicide machine Stream From the Heavens, but we need every member to participate, and, having found religion, guitarist Mikko Ruotsalainen isn’t exactly prioritizing Decibel interviews right now. While we wait for him to lose it again (it’s happened before), Skepticism’s debut is more than worth the plaudits. It’s the template for so much of the doom that’s (incredibly) crossed over to broader, more “sophisticated” audiences over the last few years. So, now that you more or less get their titling m.o., dive into the “Everdarkgreen” here.
The April 2014 issue of Decibel also features Carcass, The Black Dahlia Murder, Gorguts, and At the Gates, and can be purchased here. But why not just get a full subscription to ensure that you never miss an issue?
