Impending Doom still does their part to silence the oppressors on Living Sacrifice
Posted by The Skyliner on April 15th, 2009
Trey Lancaster
Photo Editor
“Hell must fear me! Hell must fear us all!” If you have been to a hardcore or metal show in the past couple months, then it is likely that you have seen a shirt with this printed on the back. No, it’s not the shirt of an emergent church; it’s an Impending Doom shirt. Impending Doom is another member of the Facedown Records family that is hitting the music world with everything they have and their new album The Serpent Servant proves this.
Hailing from Riverside, Calif., the members of Impending Doom were immersed into the heavy metal and hardcore music scene growing up. This is very easy to see in their musical structure. Hard-hitting, crushing and brutal are just a few adjectives that I would use to describe their sound.
Each track is filled with blazing fast thrash parts, brutal breakdowns and a few face melting leads here and there. Not only is the music amazing, but also the vocal work of front man Brooke Reeves is amazing. His vocals are very low and have a guttural growl to them at times and are very reminiscent of Bruce Fitzhugh of the legendary Christian metal band Living Sacrifice. Brooke’s vocals have matured a lot since the band’s debut album. On the first album his vocals were straight gutturals the entire album and near impossible to understand even with the lyrics in front of you, but on this album he stepped up and did some of the best vocal work I have heard in a very long time from a band in the death metal scene.
The new album is not just great music and vocal work, but the lyrical content of this album is amazing. This album deals mostly with defeating hell and the devil’s minions. Many of the songs have a theme of battle or of a spiritual struggle. One of my favorite tracks on this album is “Storming The Gates Of hell.” In this song, Brooke is basically giving hell a warning that this battle will not be won by them and that we are coming to tackle hell and its minions head-on. One of my favorite lines comes in the middle of the song, “Here we are. Storming the gates of hell. Our whispers will silence your roars and our roars will wreck your lives. So here we come.” This song is also one of the fastest and heaviest tracks on the album, which is always a good combination.
Another track that really stands out to me on this album is “When I Speak.” This track talks about how there will be many things at the end of days that will be extraordinary and challenges listeners to rise up and question everything. The end times will be filled with deception and Impending Doom chooses to warn others about this inevitability. This track is also a really good musical mix of thrash parts and very sludgy doom metal parts.
Overall, this album has just about everything: brutally crushing music, astonishing vocal work and amazing spirit-filled lyrics. If you are a fan of brutal metal then you should definitely give this album a listen.