Search - Ramesses :: We Will Lead You To Glorious Times

A good idea poorly executed.

Mr. M. C. Hood | Bury St Edmunds, England | 05/04/2005

(2 out of 5 stars)

"I want to get into this, I really do. In a live setting Ramesses destroy all those who stand before them. Channelling the might of their namesake's spirit into their spiralling, doomier-than-thou riffing. They create a wall of sound plumbing the depths of rumbling psychedelia to the point of sensory overload (it actually made the person I saw them with throw up). Their riffs are so grotesquely rotten you would swear someone in front of you had farted and the drumming so violent that the front row genuinely fear for their safety.



All this, apart from Mark Greening's fantastically innovative and spiteful skin pummelling (see the opening to Ramesses II), however, is lost on record. Billy Anderson's usually flawless production sounds a bit too muddy for my liking. I know its probably supposed to sound rough and grimy to complement the decomposing racket the band are thrashing out but it makes it hard to decipher guitar, bass and vocals. Yet despite the crushing nature of their filth-encrusted psych-doom they dont really get away with it.

Going for the balls-out brutal approach, preferring monolithic tsunamis of overdriven guitar abuse, means the intricacies of their red-eyed solos and torturously drawn out menace of the vocal delivery is all but buried under wave after wave of low-end destruction. This may sound fantastic, but after witnessing their otherworldly power in the live setting it seems a bit one dimensional.



Undoubtedly Ramesses are fantastic musicians with an unbelievably black yet morbidly entrancing brand of drug addled sludge mayhem to unleash on the worlds ears. And I probably sound like a pissed off Electric Wizard fan who begrudges those who left the mighty `Wizard to explore pastures older and more decaying. And to an extent that's true. Electric Wizard appreciate texture, space and even ambience as part of doom's mighty template. Ramesses, much like the tanks on their cover art, on the other hand, are death incarnate. Cold, rancid, lumbering, unfeeling and inevitable. This apocalyptic misanthropy may well be their interpretation of modern doom but others do it better (Rwake, Khanate, Hyatari) and I prefer something a bit more groovy when I skin up.

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