The Dark Side

What is it with Ireland and doom? Since I’ve started looking into the Irish metal scene proper, I’ve increasingly gained the feeling that we gravitate to it, North and South alike, with releases and the festival scene being heavily weighted in its favour. This is not a problem; it’s a damn good genre, and I’m endlessly impressed at the extent to which bands leave their mark by taking its key features in different directions: you have heavier death-doom acts like The Crawling and Graveyard Dirt going heavier, post-rock acts like Third Island and zhOra making it stranger, and melodic or Celtic influences giving us Old Season and Darkest Era . Evidently the simple, recognisable tenets of doom give bands plenty of opportunity to carve out their own identity. Enter Causticgod , who find another direction again, with a debut record that is fresh and familiar at once. In keeping with this trend of diversity, Causticgod's niche is deep in the classic, stoner doom province of