I'm going to wave my "doom metal" flag here. I bought this seminal album upon it's release in 1987. To be fair, at the time I didn't know "doom metal" was a thing, and after purchasing it I still didn't. The great thing about being angry and young was that I didn't like following "rules", so while I was a skateboarder with a mohawk I could still get into whatever music I wanted, even #candlemass .
I bought this album solely because of it's bad ass album cover. It's appropriation of a Thomas Cole painting drips with sorrow and loneliness. The music the cover contains is every bit as sorrowful. It's Black Sabbathian dirge offset by the melodramatic operatic vocals of Messiah Marcolin.
My friend's all hated this album, so it turned into an appropriately solitary listen. It's slow songs with Gothic narratives suited me. I would hide in my bedroom away from my step father and pour over the lyric sheet as these masterful riffs set to glacial tempos drifted me into almost out-of-body distraction. I still know all the lyrics and all the theatrical vocal swoops of the chubby Messiah. That was another thing I liked about the record: they were not a pretty band. While the liner notes had an array of band photography I felt as if they were part of my "not gonna get laid" set.
This album was in stark contrast to the thrash and crossover metal bands I had been listening to at the time and reminded me of the roots of mystical menace that had drawn me to metal in the first place. In my personal history with music I can see with hindsight just how important this album was in shaping my later tastes.
Tune low play slow.
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