Band:	Apostle Of Solitude
Album:	Of Woe And Wounds
Style:	Doom metal
Release date:	November 2014

01. Distance And The Cold Heart
02. Blackest Of Times
03. Whore's Wings
04. Lamentations Of A Broken Man
05. Die Vicar Die
06. Push Mortal Coil
07. This Mania
08. Siren
09. Luna
10. Distance And The Cold Heart [reprise]

Don't ask me why, but I've been listening to a hell of a lot of doom metal lately. Perhaps that is why, after such an extended period of complete blankness since I picked up this album, I decided to finally approach Of Woe And Wounds and give Apostle Of Solitude a fair shot.

Apostle Of Solitude's doom has energy. It's not the boisterous classicisms of Candlemass or the hazy belchings of Cathedral, but it packs some ancient murder-blues a la Budgie or Black Sabbath into an unusually fast-paced bludgeoning instrument of Solstice-y proportions. Maybe this is just me getting sick of overdosing on funeral doom, but it's nice to hear a bit of that old-school attitude. Of course, it's not long before things pull back for "Lamentations Of A Broken Man," a gloomy, Luciferian dirge if there ever were one. There is as much drowsy pall-bearing on this album as there is lively riffing.

The bass warbles thickly and fuzzily in conjunction with the lead guitars, all solidly drenched in the tinny sharpness of a smoke-filled gig in some dude's garage. Chuck Brown's voice perfectly suits this forceful melancholia, with hints of Ozzy Osbourne crawling in through the cracks of his pleasantly thin and earnest voice. It's the sound of many a doom band doing many a doom band thing, as they will.

The colorful riffs of "Blackest Of Times," the neverending "Die Vicar Die," and the layers of soulful harmonies and swampy noodling omnipresent in "Siren" stand out strongest, but the entire album is more or less one solid unit of hazy doom. Apostle Of Solitude play it safe and straightforward in the old style of doom, bringing little to the table that could be classified as progressive or innovative, but hearing that bass purr and those guitars twangily drone and dronily twang is adventure enough. It's not the best, but Of Woe And Wounds is certainly one of the better doom releases of 2014.