Vincent Crowley
Biography
The moment Vincent Crowley pulled the plug on the long-lasting Acheron saga in 2019, Vincent Crowley started this initiative here under his own name and as his main focus. More recent members of Acheron (the guitar players Art Taylor & Eric Stewart) have also joined for the ride which is much more oriented towards Heavy Metal in the way of legends like King Diamond and Candlemass, with the doom-laden side of the Acheron repertoire not too far away either.
Expect both epic and traditional Heavy and Doom Metal heroics to befall you, those currents gracefully bound by small doses of old school Death Metal accelerations, Crowley supervising the dark atmospheric musicalities with his staple sinister powerful growling vocals. There is quite a bit of melody exuded both from the lead and the riff department, this segment sometimes serving a solemn, funeral-like procession, sometimes helping the good old death mount a slower epic horse. The Horror themed content is in perfect symbiosis with the Metal music.
Not drastically different, but different enough, from the vintage Acheron sound, this album is both a continuation and an elaboration on it. Crowley has always shown a penchant for the doomy and the slower, here he captures the very essence of the Heavy/Doom Metal currents, spicing them with just the right doze of more dynamic deathly strokes in order to make them appealing to a larger crowd, and not only to the Acheron one.
This is a confident stroll into an already familiar realm, where the man by all means feels welcome, knowing its peculiarities inside/out, but never trying them in that exact manner before. The satanic element has been completely removed from the lyrical content (now the lyrical theme is horror), there are almost no traces of it on the music either; Crowley feeling introspective, pensive, and less belligerent, having exorcised whatever demons were plaguing him earlier career, after spending more than 35 years playing, singing and touring on the Metal circuit.
Vincent Crowley deliveres something new, Heavy Metal with vocals that remind us of Acheron and Metal might not have been done like this before.