I feel so bad for Black Metal. It's one of those genre's of music that just doesn't get taken seriously at all. Maybe it's somewhere between the corpse paint and the church burning but people just don't seem to give the genre the respect that it deserves. There are so many great bands out there that make truly beautiful music that's drenched in such heavy atmosphere that it feels like it could choke you at any point. There are also a lot of bands out there that aren't that great and to be honest, it's these guys that kind of ruin it for the rest of them. I'm not going to just lumber anyone wearing corpse paint into this category but rather all of the bands that just fail to strike up any kind of interesting sound to their music. It's a shame really because with such strong subject matter, you'd think that most Black Metal bands could at least sound a little deep or meaningful. Instead what we all to often get is a couple of blokes screaming like geriatric smokers and beating up some instruments with heavy reverb and echo dripping off of them.

GHAST's "Dread Doom Ruin" is one such album and although it this is a band that have quite a bit of notoriety behind them, I just can't feel anything remotely interesting within the music. This is their second full length album since 2007. You might think that in eight years they have managed to craft a unique and engaging sound that differentiates them from all the other bands out there. You might think this but you would be wrong. Playing like a very poor attempt at writing something reminiscent of BURZUM, the album painfully wails it's way through half an hour of embarrassingly badly named songs that have as much character as a dead mouse. The album features a bizarre amount of feedback screeches to open songs and this only serves to set the tone for the vocals that grate their way through each song with just enough effects piled on to mask to mask the low fidelity production. The guitars are incredibly tinny and I can't help but feel that although GHAST are just trying to pay homage to the roots of this dark and brooding genre, they completely seem to miss the mark and end just end up sounding like one of those bad parody bands you find on YouTube running around in misty forests wearing cheap larping costumes.

I hate to hate on a band and any band that can release more than one E.P is clearly doing something right. I'm sure this is an album that true die-hard satanic bastards will love and adore but it just falls short of being remotely accessible to anyone that isn't fluent in Lovecraftian incantations.