While I've not ventured to far into Doom Metal, the new release from GOATPSALM made me quite excited. See the cool thing about Bandcamp is the fact that you can see roughly how many people have bought an album and what they have to say and whether or not it's worth checking out and with all sorts of recommendations for this album in there, I couldn't wait to delve in.

The album is low, slow and heavy just like you'd expect. The first couple songs take you on a journey to hell and back, almost quite literally with "Grey Rocks" talking about a man's murder, not knowing how he died or quite where he is (but the description seems to indicate the gates of hell). The outro of the song is quite creepy sounding, almost along the lines of something you'd hear in a horror movie or something like Goosebumps. The second song "Flowers of the Underworld" is a song about what I would say is the "Mother of Hell" maybe? Reading through the lyrics it's almost as if it's meant to talk about Satan, but generally Satan is referred to as a male. Again, it's Doom Metal so it's slow, while the vocals are low and guttural, the ominous female vocals in the background are quite haunting. A lot of the sounds throughout this track are eerie as well; it would be interesting to see how this was recorded.

Generally, I want to talk about a lot more of the album, there's two instrumentals in there, "White Sea" and "The Waylayer (A Great Spring Hunger)" that, again, have some quite interesting sounds to them and while it's weird for a Doom Metal band, the songs keep you enthralled and refuse to be boring. All in all, "Downstream" by GOATPSALM is going upstream, this is a very unique Doom Metal album that is eerie, creepy and intriguing in all the right ways. With Halloween right around the corner, maybe you should pick it up just to have it blasting at your house and creep out the kids! Now I'm gonna go listen to this album a few more times and try to find bits I may have missed the first few through and hopefully pick up one of the last few physical copies they have available.