Doom metal seems extremely tricky to get right. Along with death metal, it seems to have the lowest success to failure ratio in metal. While there are some doom bands out there that are absolutely fantastic, they seem to gain that level of awesome by blending doom with another style. For example MASTODON (sludge doom/metal) blending their sound with prog to make themselves more unique. Another great example would be PARADISE LOST, who blend doom with death metal. AMONG GODS fits more in to this description, blending the droning, slow, and heavy, doom stylings with a more brutal and angry death metal twist.

Unfortunately, despite this ambition, and conceptually a good idea, AMONG GODS fails to really do anything exciting. Sure the vocals are just as brutal as you would hope, but that really about it. Nothing about "Ghost Empire" ever really interested me and nothing about it felt like AMONG GODS was really achieving what they set out to do. Really, it's not like it's bad music. It's just nothing new, and there's nothing interesting about it to keep you going back for more. Take one song from the album and you may enjoy it, as far as doom goes. But take the entire album and you soon realise that you're just listening to the same thing on repeat. Each musician does a good job on their respective instrument, and the vocals of Kenneth, as mentioned, are extremely brutal and heavy. These are all good things. It's just a shame that they couldn't write anything more exciting.

So now with three albums under their belt, it's hard to wish for AMONG GODS to have a better showing next time around. It'd be nice. It's great to see a doom metal band achieve what they are after, but it's not looking too hopeful for this band.

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