It’s early 2017, and time for more doom. No, I don’t mean the assorted headlines and accompanying wailing and gnashing of teeth that fills the internet, but rather Doom with a capital “D” a music form that can be traced back to what many argue is the first ever Heavy Metal album, the eponymous ‘Black Sabbath’. Today’s dose is care of rather new but equally old school Portland four-piece R.I.P., offering up ‘In The Wind’, an album that has been available for maybe a year in some places, but is getting a new push with Riding Easy Records.

Opener ‘The Scythe’ sounds anything but doom laden, promising instead a journey into the horror-rock territory of The Misfits, and I was more then a little expecting Evil Elvis himself to croon out when the vocals hit. Instead, the band are just teasing with a small instrumental taster, and ‘In The Wind Part 1’ hooks the listener in with a sound that harkens back to the early days of Saint Vitus where those veterans of the form played on punk tours, drawing in fans with their stripped back, chugging delivery, an audience that would equally appreciate R.I.P. Indeed, follow up ‘Tremble’ has a garage sound that owes every bit as much to The Stooges as it does to a certain Mr. Iommi. That said, the riffs of ‘Black Leather’ can only be the result of listening to that aforementioned legend, as well as watching a slew of seventies biker movies, and if you think that’s a bad way to spend your time, well, you’re just plain wrong! This same stomp continues though ‘Smoke & Lightning’, a track that seems to fly past like a greasy Triumph Bonneville despite clocking in at a doomy seven and a half minutes; I genuinely had to play the number a few times to make sure I hadn’t got the timing wrong, and well played to the band for making a track that could have been sounded drawn out stomp past with such a pace.

Title track ‘In The Wind’ gets two more reprieves, ‘Part 2’ sounding like nothing more than an undiscovered Pentagram demo, complete with the rough edges of a track that could have been recorded live, whilst ‘Part 3’ opens like a whiskey soaked Jim Morrison death-dirge before the bruising refrain of “in the wind” barges into the laid back idyll. The album runs over a solid ten tracks, including another short instrumental ‘Tombstone’, a gentle trippy number at odds with the in your face album opener, and not one is a filler, each having a solid place in the album.

Whilst the track titles and grim reaper album cover threaten a world of clichés, this is not the case, and R.I.P. bring together influences as wide ranging as Iggy Pop to Candlemass in a style that the band have branded as “Street Doom” (Dear editor, any chance of a some sort of slide rule and ready reckoner to keep track of all these sub-genres, please?). Personally, I’ve decided to put it into the category of “music I like”, and I hope you, the reader, will agree.

(8/10 Spenny)

https://www.facebook.com/R.I.P.P.D.X

(8/10 Spenny)