Band:	The Wandering Midget
Album:	From The Meadows Of Opium Dreams
Style:	Doom metal
Release date:	November 2012

01. Prince Of Fire
02. Temples In The Sky
03. She Wolf
04. The Forest Lights

Quick! Guess the band's style! They call themselves The Wandering Midget, their latest offering is titled From The Meadows Of Opium Dreams, and although I could be wrong (and probably am), the album's artwork seems to depict guys on camels wandering through some strange alien landscape with a bunch of spirit-like hands reaching up from the ground. If you guessed that this is a stoner doom release, then congratulations: you know your metal subgenre aesthetics. Yup, The Wandering Midget are about as stoner as they come, so much so that if you look close enough at this album's cover you can almost see the THC crystals hidden within the paint design. Anywho, if the band's name and the silly, yet amusing title of their 2012 output weren't enough to give it away, their music surely will.

The four track album kicks off with "Prince Of Fire" and at first glance it appears that The Wandering Midget are sticking true to the most strict guidelines of their genre possible, choosing not to wander too far off the field into more original realms. Indeed, the opener sounds a lot like a Candlemass track doesn't it? Especially with the deep vocals and powerful, memorable chorus ("When the moon is full you can hear them coming/Prince of fire and disciples of hell/Evil will prevail"). The band's rumblings continue to the end, with a brief, though well-delivered, little bluesy solo on behalf of the guitarist. So, it would seem, this is just going to be yet another typical, formulaic stoner doom release, right?

Well, not entirely. You see, the first track on From The Meadows Of Opium Dreams is a bit of a misnomer, because all three subsequent tracks are 10 minute+ mammoths of noise that, although not containing anything seriously avant-garde and out-of-the-box, do manage to pack in a few more interesting moments among their long structures. "Temples In The Sky," for example, begins with a very dreamlike guitar melody that later evolves into droney riffs which the vocals get sprinkled over, which then degenerate into a dreamlike melody once again around the 11-minute mark, only to climax later towards the song's end. The same can be said of "She Wolf," which maintains its droney sound until about 8 minutes, after which a magnificent, psychedelic atmosphere takes over, and "Follow The Forest Lights," which also gets a lot more space-like towards its end.

Although The Wandering Midget certainly aren't the originators of massively long doom songs (*cough*Sleep*cough*Yob), they do manage to strike out an interesting balance in their music with it. That is, with the song lengths, the band manages to effectively space out the more melodic, trippy moments of the album as well as the more droney, "doomish" moments, so that the listener is never really waiting too long for either to pop up. So, although the musical style on From The Meadows Of Opium Dreams isn't entirely original, the songwriting somewhat is, and hey: a little originality is better than none at all, no? If nothing else, it definitely shows that the band put on their thinking caps for this album... either that, or it was just one of those spontaneous clever thoughts that comes to mind after a good rip of the bong. The world may never know.