Caronte – Ghost Owl EP ...

During this weekend of early October I’ll have the chance to go rather close to home for an impressive evening devoted to the darkest forms of occult doom metal performed by some new, “established” and “historical” monsters of the genres, respectively Black Oath, Abysmal Grief, Necros Christos and Mortuary Drape.

But also the space and time devoted to the opening acts, the “emerging” bands, is carrier of cool surprises and great music. For example Caronte will be there.
Caronte is a new band added to the way attractive Italian doom metal panorama (there’s no chauvinistic excess here, you know) and is cool indeed.
Actually this band is not new for me as I had the first impact; probably in the best way, especially for this band, i.e., I saw them playing live in a squat near Milano while opening for Cough in a sticky hot night last May. Few people (because underground metal fans are lazy …) and a bunch of highly inspired heavy musicians. Our jaws couldn’t but fall down in admiration.
  
Caronte is a brand new band as they started composing music and playing it during 2011. But there’s some (surprising) background experience supportive of these guys’ activity.
Band members are Dorian Bones on vocals, Henry Bones on bass, Tony Bones on guitar and Mike De Chirico on drums.
As from their bio, Caronte raised from the ashes of a dandy-looking, horror punk to death rock band from Parma, The Wraiths Orchestra, which was mixing horror punk à-la-Misfits, dark sounds and melodies into an intriguing catchy and slightly morbid mélange. Moreover  singer Dorian Bones is also militating into the by now fully established black metal/black’n’roll band Whiskey Ritual.
Caronte is a different beast and, oh, so charming!

The name adopted by the band, Caronte, aka Charon, means the “guide of the dead”, the “ferryman” in charge of transporting the newly deceased souls across the Styx swamp and the Acheron river which divided the world of the living from the world of the dead. This is beautifully described in Dante’s Divine Comedy book of Hell. The mythologic reference figure for the band is therefore grievous, tragic and obscure, and accordingly doom could but be the metal genre employed.

However Caronte band declares a profound inspiration by the work of Aleister Crowley as well, which adds to the occult aura permeating Caronte’s music.
Recently Caronte released  their début EP called Ghost Owl with elegant golden and black cover arts, out on the Italian label Lo-Fi Creatures / Moonlight Records.

The EP includes three rather long tracks with an average length of 7 minutes.
Music-wise the band’s style is a spurious variety of “old-school” heavy, gloomy and doped, grimly noisy alienating doom in the vein of the classic and present-day masters, i.e. Black Sabbath, Pentagram, Electric Wizard and Cough. This grim doom background is contaminated by various other features, like groove-laden stoner and vintage dark, Sabbath-inspired psychedelic rock and a taste for obscure and melodramatic musical constructions like those found in other Italian cult doom bands. Especially for the latter feature comes the remarkable voice of the (well-built) singer Dorian Bones, who abandons black metal and delivers an impressive heartful and powerful exploit reminding of memorable vocal styles like early Danzig as well as Morrissey of The Smiths.
The inspiration to the monster, old-school doom bands and to Electric Wizard surely helps the band in shaping the core of their own style of “acid ethereal doom” which sounds “old”, almost mossy and enriched by raw, hypnotic rhythms almost physically smelling of incense or psychotropic smokes good for some blasphemous occult rituals. The occasional employment of rock accelerations and the adoption of frankly stoner rock constructions surely enlighten the occult doom background of Caronte’s style.

These accelerations characterize especially the first song, Ghost Owl, which is slightly faster than the other ones. Especially in the darker, more doomy songs or parts of songs, like in the second track Black Gold or in the third one Trice of Dreams, the explosions of Dorian’s passionate and often desperate chanting style may sound almost surprising when one would expect an underworld-like baritone gloomy aggression as in Abysmal Grief or Wizardesque torn shouts, filthy screams or banshee-like hisses.  No, Dorian is carrier of loads of melody and sense of drama and, surprisingly, there’s no trace of gothic stickiness, even when delicate contributions of female background vocals are occasionally employed.  Indeed Dorian’s vocal style may sound almost “alien” sometimes as it is so reminding of the dark sounds of the 80’s. But it is a distinctive, quite original and way charming feature of this band.
The surely great interpretation and emotional burst carried out and evoked by the vocal parts are beautifully supported by the very well written song structures, strong distortion and downtuning of the great leading bass and guitar, powerful blasting drumming and a rather dirty production. The latter might be disliked by someone, but for me it is essential for any doom metal album for adding atmosphere and, well, for getting rid of excess melodrama. The songs in Ghost Owl EP are beautiful and involving. I don’t want to use the word “infectious” because these songs grab you much by the passion and not only by the morbid, doped doom sounds.

This EP is an excellent start for this new band, even if it is too short to fully show the potential of this band as experienced in the live exhibition I happened to see. The EP ends  and you feel like being halfway along a path, you need the story to go on.  Let’s go on … ……….. 8.5/10

Words: Mari

Caronte @ Facebook
Caronte @ Myspace
Lo-Fi Creatures @ Myspace
Lo-Fi Creatures @ Facebook
Caronte's Black Gold @ YouTube