Twenty years is a long time to wait for a new album, and you can forgive the world for maybe having moved on. When the new album is from the reignited Warning however, you make sure you sit up and pay attention. A band almost legendary within doom metal circles, their previous release Watching From A Distance has taken on an almost mythic aura and is regularly voted as one of the best doom albums of all time. Rituals Of Shame may have a lot to live up too, but you get the feeling the 20 year gestation period may just have been vocalist/guitarist Patrick Walker taking a breath.
Not that he has been lazy in those twenty years with other band 40 Watt Sun taking up all his attention. Rituals Of Shame seems to have appeared from nowhere though, and allows for a complete resetting of the senses prior to exploring the undoubtedly emotional turmoil which is about to unfold.
One of the great things about Warning is that they literally do not sound like any other doom band. They cover all the tropes…slow riffs, glacial songs, yet in Walker they have someone willing to open up their inner emotions and literally bring you to tears with the cathartic, unrelenting lyrics which somehow manage to cast a mirror on your own feelings. It’s something that leaves you feeling utterly washed out by the end of the album, yet somehow cleansed.
Rituals Of Shame carries on in this vein and whilst on the surface you may find proceedings a little too glacial, it draws you in to its monolithic world much as an intriguing piece of cinema or art may do. Its almost as if a switch is turned on in your brain and as soon as the music starts, the receptors recognise the gravity of what is to come and unleashes the chemicals that allow you to tune completely in. Walker’s clean vocals are no small part in this, with his weary intonations paced just at that level where each word seems to drop like a stone.
So does the album match up to its predecessor? Well yes, and in parts actually surpasses it. It feels like an album which has always existed, yet nothing about it sounds like anything else you might hear (apart from previous Warning albums). There’s a gravity to it but not in the way which makes it pompous or overbearing. It just feels natural, and maybe it’s that which makes it have such an impact each time you listen. In a way, it transcends not just its genre boundaries (and at heart this really is a doom album), but music in general but avoids falling into the trap of ending up being lapped up by hipster connoisseurs who see art in everything. It remains truly an album for the fans, and will continue to pick up new fans organically. A truly stunning release which will go down as one of the albums of the year and in time may even transcend that.
