Saint Vitus - Saint Vitus (2019)

Since starting this amateurish blog about two years ago, one of the metal subgenres I have opened up to the most has been doom metal in its more modern and old-school forms and its neighboring subgenres like stoner metal. It’s not that I was ever vehemently opposed to doom metal or anything. It just hadn’t been a subgenre I would go to as frequently as I do now thanks to abundance of it in the underground that I feel intrigued by and drawn to. But what I had generally found to be a significant issue for me with doom metal was the amount of unabashed Black Sabbath copy-cattery, maybe not note for note, but so many bands playing the style have had such a comfortability with simply harping on the metal godfathers’ style to a point where it became distracting and came across less as tribute and more as rip-off. There are certainly bands that have channelled Sabbath their whole careers and done it mostly very well; Candlemass with their recent output comes to mind. But there are also bands like Electric Wizard (though they do have the genuine classic, Dopethrone, under their belt) whose increasingly overt Sabbath-worship has become such an irritating factor in their music.

For many bands, the mere channeling of Black Sabbath, the transparent attempts to cop Toni Iommi’s riff-writing style is frustratingly all they bring to the table, and unfortunately, that is where I have to bring Saint Vitus and their self-titled album into this discussion. Full disclosure, I had never heard of or listened to Saint Vitus going into this album, and my intentions to familiarize myself with their back catalogue before this album eventually fell victim to other things going on in my life and more pressing musical projects. But this album really doesn’t make me want to dive into that back catalogue any more than before, and I can’t imagine what I might possibly find there that somehow shifts the compass needle of my feelings for this album more closer to the positive.

I understand they carry a respected legacy as one of doom metal’s earliest formative forces, and perhaps it’s better that I (at least for now) assess their self-titled ninth album here without the pain of having to lament their tarnishing of the legacy that their eight albums before this one had laid up for them. But anyway, into the meat of this thing.

As I mentioned earlier, this album falls in line with the old-school style of heavy metal that Black Sabbath pioneered that has now been retroactively associated with doom metal. If there’s one thing in the instrumental department that tanks this album even more than the Iommi-rip-off riffing (one of the more listenable elements of this album), it’s the disastrously fuzzed out guitar solos that grace the bridges of so many unlucky songs here, which I understand is a staple of the old school style, but the solos here, much like the songs and the album as a whole, tend to meander aimlessly as if being unpreparedly improvised. And their chaotic delivery at the increased paces they enter during the songs they’re on only serves to highlight their lack of both direction and fit. The effects pedal abuse on the solos during “12 Years in the Tomb” and “Wormhole” are prime examples of the soloing style’s roughness and distractiveness where they end up being shoved in on said songs.

It is perhaps Scott Reagers’ incessant and obnoxiously forced operatic vibratto over the cheesily rhymed lyrics at the vocal helm, though that adds a consistent grating on the ears as is comes off as such a caricaturish impersonation of Ronnie James Dio that unfortunately adds to that characterization of the album as a whole being a modern mockery of the early days of heavy metal. The band certainly capture that old-school aesthetic just fine, which is no surprise, being that they come from it, but it mostly comes off as cheesy and cartoon-ish in an unintentional manner beyond the intended campiness of the devilish subject matter the style became famous for.

While a bit hard to talk about in the context of the early doom stylings of the rest of the album, I think it’s worth mentioning what a confusing and troublesome note the album closes on with minute and a half of proto-thrash/hardcore punk of “Useless”, which is so ridiculously amateurly executed and fits like a square peg in a round hole into the rest of the doom vibe the album conjures.

As far as highlights go, I will point out though that despite it not being spared from the album’s ubiquitous vocal irritation, I did like the more quietly impending clean guitar interlude “A Prelude to…” and the momentarily satisfying grooves on songs like “Hour Glass” and “Bloodshed” (even though they are indeed, still riddled with other issues).

But yeah, this album is more of an embarrassment to the forefathers of metal than a dignifying embodiment of their legacy, and with so little in the way of originality, there’s not much else more to summarize here.

Caricature/10