Ii: The Ground Below [LP]

Garden-fresh trail-blazers from the UK, Famyne drag Doom kicking and screaming into the 21st century on epic new album The Ground Below. The LP is a brave and inimitable statement which re-draws a line in the sands of metal tradition. Famyne boldly march over the limits, re-riffing the rules, washing listeners in pristine waves of hypnotic melody on 8 tablets of stone-carved ageless songs that The Ground Below lays on the altar. Tracks like "For My Sins" and "Babylon" conjure paragon English Doom with a long line of lineage like country-mates Warning, Paradise Lost, Pagan Altar and Cathedral to songs like "A Submarine" where warm oceans of sweeping guitars and wide-screen desperate euphony bring to mind genre-changing pioneers like Anathema and Porcupine Tree. Fans of everything from Opeth, Katatonia to Soundgarden and all the trad legends of Sabbath, St Vitus and Solitude Aeturnus will be suitably wowed in Famyne's wake. The Ground Below is a modern classic, reverential but so supremely powerful that Famyne have securely carved their own place on the monoliths of the future.