CloudsTasteSatanicI was rather surprised when the editor sent me the new Clouds Taste Satanic CD ‘ Your Doom Has Come’ to review; my first thought being, “They’re bloody prolific as I’m sure I reviewed their last one only a couple of months ago!” A quick bit of research, namely checking Ave Noctum shows it was actually over a whole year since I reviewed their previous release ‘To Sleep Beyond The Earth’ . What was the cause of this confusion? In simple terms, the prior release had made such an impression on me that despite the volume of music that I had bought or been sent to review in the intervening fourteen months that it was getting regular plays, and just stuck in my mind as fresh and new. So, could this second release live up to the high expectations of the first? Read on.

Rather than the two monolithic tracks that filled the first album, ‘Your Doom Has Come’ has a whopping six numbers, albeit as before, being purely instrumental, they could equally be six movements of a single work, lacking as they do the obvious separation of lyrical themes. Instead the band rely on pure musicianship to draw the listener in, all with a suitably doom laden approach. After the dark funereal march of ‘Ten Kings’, ‘One Third of The Sun’ with a harder, almost industrial opening riff had me instantly thinking that rather than an album of tracks to have heads banging in a club, Clouds Taste Satanic have instead created a sound track to the darkest and most dystopian movies you could hope to watch. ‘One Third of The Sun’ could easily slot into ‘In The Mouth of Madness’, the ever more frantic pace of the track keeping time to Sam Neill’s frenzied fleeing from inter-dimensional beings; ‘Beast From The Sea’ happily, or should that be fearfully, conveys the march of the beast from ‘Cloverfield’; whilst ‘Out of The Abyss’ is surely a candidate for inclusion in any new ‘Hellraiser’ movie, as could ‘Dark Army’ with its brooding menace, assuming the franchise is ever raised from the straight to DVD limbo it currently resides in. The skill and musical ability displayed by the band deserves to be matched to the higher production values of a decent movie, rather than the recent shoddy affair that couldn’t even afford Doug Bradley as Pinhead.

Listening to ‘Your Doom Has Come’ I soon found myself drifting, not away with boredom, but into the landscape of the music, being absorbed by the sound and the visions it created. I still don’t know how this music would play live, although I’d love to find out, but as a listening experience at home, it is hard to beat. As ridiculous as this may sound, I found it a massively visual album, the bands sound evoking a veritable army of cinematic images in my mind. Were I the sort who had to obsessively file my CDs by genre, rather than have Clouds Taste Satanic nestling next to Black Sabbath, it would be housed next to Claudio Simonetti’s Goblin and John Carpenter’s works.

(8.5/10 Spenny)

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