Old Blood is an acid rock and doom metal hybrid out of L.A. whose second LP, Acid Doom, was released on Metal Assult during the summer of 2020. Check out the album’s full stream, and read what we had to say about it below:
Doom metal is the hungry spirit of a dead man’s voice that haunts dingy, basement clubs and illegal, horticultural enclaves. This louse-bitten bodach with its sagging, swing girth, and unnatural weight that holds in the air in defiance of god’s will and gravity is the shade cast by an earlier tradition of foreboding bardism, that being acid rock.
The heathen matrimony of acid rock and the blues is the misty primordial ooze from which all metal ultimately arose, but none bare the crown of annihilation forged in this slimy keep with the same command as the few who have pledged their allegiance to doom metal.
L.A.’s Old Blood recognize their linage within the metal family tree, and in seeing it’s oldest branches withering at their stalks, attempts to transfuse new life into the dry, crinckly veins of these gnarled limbs by injecting the lysergic, batter acid of downer blues and mystic aura of southern jazz back into circulation.
Old Blood’s second LP Acid Doom, their first with singer Lynx, is a bewitching exchange of alligator-toothed grooves, swamp-blues organ hymns, and spooky-motion set to sound. The album feels like a NOLA jump-blues band, overtaken by the magnetism and deadly-elegance of a voodoo vampire priestess and made to do her malevolent biding, traveling the country, swallowing souls, and regurgitating them in ornate jars that are then stored in the cupboards of their sleeper van.
“Lake Bottom” starts Acid Doom off with a watery surf of psychedelic haze, burning organ melodies, and Lynx-fanged, misty-souled vocals. “Bring To Nowhere” recalls the powerfully heavy and softly textured, drop-out R ‘n’ B of early Deep Purple and Iron Butterfly.
The brooding and chilling “Veinscraper” will make you feel like you’ve got spiders scurrying through your heart valves. “Heavy Water” provides some respite with its de-accelerated tempo and the introduction of some British folk guitars. It is followed by the equally disarming noir jazz suite “Formosa Lodge.” The final horn melody of “Farmosa” then transitions effortlessly into the fuzz-thunder of the freaky, skull-slapper “Slothgod.”
“Orbit” welcomes to the fold some eerie cabaret styled melodies that flow like fluid from a weeping wound into the cauldron of the witchy, whip-up “Pentahead.” Acid Doom‘s spell is finally broken with the switch-blade wielding, biker brawl at the House of the Rising Sun, “429” which will break a chair over your head, steel your leather jacket, and take off into the night on a smoke beltchign steel-hog, leaving you to nurse your back of your broken skull to the ever more distant sound of its pythoness cackle.
Acid Doom is the ride of your life that you’ll be lucky to survive with your sanity.
Get a copy of Old Blood’s Acid Doom from Metal Assault here.
