S.O.M.
Ethno Doom
6.7
S.o.M. is a folk/metal/doom band from Croatia. Apparently, S.o.M. have released Ethno-Doom as a full length release and while the artwork attached to this review is of the new album, what is actually being reviewed here is a four song demo that includes four tracks included on the full length. While this may leave some of you scratching your heads, I found the demo of Ethno-Doom a bit tedious to listen to and I'm not entirely sure if I could stand more than four songs from S.o.M.
S.o.M.'s sound, for the most part, is very very stagnant. The music centers around a heavy and droning doom riff that is typically rich in heaviness, if not interesting. The vocals alternate between female clean vocals and death vocals with occassional clean male vocals. Again, all these ingredients work, it's just executed with little excitement or enthusiasm. Not one song on here sounds different from the other. There is an occassional epic riff but this demo never really gets going and by the time "Vuprem Oci" rolls around you're more than ready to listen to something else.
What S.o.M. also fails to deliver on here is the Ethno as opposed to the Doom. There are no flutes, strings, mouth-harps, lutes, hurdy-gurdys, or even keyboards (!). I think a more appropriate name for the demo would just be Doom, as there's not much Ethno here at all. To juxtapose this next to say, Haggard, there's an awful lot to be desired. However, even the doom elements here are not entirely satisfying as the same riff is essentially used on each song making this drone a lot more than it should.
S.o.M. is not wholly awful, it's just not very interesting. Putting this review up next to say, the new Tyr, puts it all in perspective. Fortunately for S.o.M. this is just a demo and there's lots of room for improvement here with lots of time to do it. But for right now, from a compositional perspective, this is dull.
