Doom Metal with Death vocals has always captivated me, of how insanely crazy and mind bending music can get. The music takes you to an emotional journey that can put some of the big names in Hollywood to shame. German Death-Doom Metal band THE FOG released their debut full length "Perpetual Blackness" earlier this year on January 25^th and it looks promising thanks to the dark atmospheric album cover artwork. The opening song "Inaneness" is just a dark atmospheric Doom Metal song. On the outset, it sounds very generic with it lasting more than 9 minutes, but the thick sludgy riffs and the nasty growling vocals of V.Lord does add a lot of meat in the music. The song gets faster as it progresses and all throughout it has 'crowd favourite' written all over it. I must say here that, this song reaffirmed to me that the music really was very much what the album artwork intended to convey – dark, gloomy and anger. Great artwork there I must say. "Crawling Doom" is a much shorter song with some cool riffs, but I soon felt that the riffs didn't stand the test of the time, even within the short duration of the song. The song feels repetitive and lacking innovativeness even on the 2^nd try.

"Entropy Pillars" uses the unpolished production to its advantage as the atmospheric feeling creeps in once again with some excellent growling vocals and neck breaking riffs.  "Creeping Lunacy" within its 4:41 minutes manages to squeeze in some eerie atmospheric parts and in the latter half goes full mental into almost a chaotic bliss. Those nasty growling vocals once again prove that they are such potent in these kinds of music. This brand of Doom Death can easily get boring after a few songs, but so far THE FOG manages to keep my interest afloat. "Gloom Shoals" makes you go into even more depressive mode with its Doomy repetitive riffs.  The title track "Perpetual Blackness" is a song that you would be singing after smoking drugs in the middle of a thick forest. It just gets darker and heavier than the previous song, and honestly I have mixed feelings about this. The album ends with a 12 minutes song in "Grievous Scourge", but honestly the song doesn't offer anything new to the listener beyond its length. I usually have really high expectations from Doom Metal bands with Death Metal vocals, but THE FOG although did impress me in few songs, it fell short of my expectations, mainly due to its lack of innovativeness and variety. The riffs, vocals and everything in-between often felt repeated for the sake of repeating as it's a Doom band. But make no mistake, "Perpetual Blackness" does offer some really excellent songs, and can be worth its time, especially for its good production here.