Iron Heel - Book of Grief

There was a time when Electric Wizard was really heavy, people will hate me for this, but the new stuff just doesn’t cut it for me, I’m more of a Dopethrone dude, when I first heard that album, my ears just exploded, and I couldn’t listen to anything for a whole month, it was pure heavy. Since then Electric Wizard have gone their own path, but without a doubt Dopethrone influenced the sound of a lot of bands, one of them is Iron Heel.

Iron Heel is a relatively new band from Vienna, Austria, they play basically a heavy mix of doom, stoner and black metal, but with an accent on the doom. Their first LP ever, Book of Grief, just dropped a couple of weeks ago, self released by the band.

Book of Grief is just 5 songs short, but the amount of distortion and heaviness make it seem like it’s crawling forever, which is not a bad thing, if you love slow distorted songs, you’re gonna love that feeling, somewhat similar to the feeling a Saint Vitus record gives you.

The production is excellent, the guitars sound larger than life, the bass is just so bassy, that it makes your stomach rumble, and the drums destroy your eardrums. Vocals wise, I was really surprised, from the first riff, I was expecting someone to start screaming in my ear, but apparently most of the vocals are clean, expect for two songs, where they sound like someone who’s competing with Mike Williams for who has the most acute throat cancer.

The dynamic of the songs don’t change that much, they are mostly doom, with a stoner tone, playing in a tripplety bluesy feel, but sometimes they hit you in the face like the song Séance which starts out with a fast beat, yet played with a lazy feel, somewhat similar to what Winter used to do, actually some parts of some songs sound close to doom death bands such as Autopsy and Coffins.

All in all this is a great release, something that sounds like Electric Wizards’s Dopethrone, yet it somewhat reminds you of Coffins having intergalactic sex with Eyehategod, has to be pretty damn good, right? Well it is, and it’s even more. Really hope this gets put out on vinyl sometime soon, cuz that’s where this music needs to be, until then, go download it on their bandcamp page, it’s pay what you want, and you know you want to pay.