Camel of Doom were officially formed back in 2001 by Kris Clayton, at the remarkable age of 13. During its infancy, the band released a series of rough EPs and their debut album, The Desert At Night, which arrived in 2003. The following year, Kris recruited a number of his schoolmates and set about playing a cluster of gigs in their local area. This line-up slowly fizzled out towards the end of 2005, but not before delivering their second album, The Diviners Sage, which was later released in 2008.
The band saw little activity for the remainder of the decade, during which time Kris further honed his craft as an experimental Doomster, being a member of UK Doom legends Esoteric. In 2011, an EP containing freshly recorded versions of some of the best songs from the debut album The Night After Time, was mixed by Esoteric frontman Greg Chandler (who has also co-engineered and mixed each album since). Reinvigorated, Kris realised that he was able to produce high quality output on his own and so set about recording a third album, Psychodramas: Breaking the Knots of Twisted Synapse. Melding together the sounds of Neurosis, Pink Floyd, Hawkwind and even aspects of Esoteric, Psychodramas was released in December 2012 and finally captured the psych/prog/doom vibe that Kris had always wanted to produce.
Kris immediately began writing the follow-up, and joined forces with bassist Simon Whittle. Not fully satisfied with the sound of programmed drums on the last album, the duo decided to enlist the help of a session drummer in the form of Thomas Vallely (Lychgate, Omega Centuri). The process of jamming the songs out with multiple members and recording with real instruments helped to shape a much more organic sounding record. In order to further their live sound, drummer Ben Nield entered the fold in August 2015, just as their fourth album Terrestrial was completed.
Camel Of Doom made their return to the stage at the end of last year, but soon after, Simon left the band. This left Kris and Ben to continue playing live as a two piece, performing several highly successful gigs together.
Terrestrial was originally released to a limited audience in February 2016. However, the band are set to re-release the album on Friday 2nd December, as they prepare for further shows, and never letting up, commence work on their fifth album. Check out the track by track of Terrestrial below.
TRACK BY TRACK
1. Cycles (The Anguish of Anger)
This song is about how constant iterations of bad feelings can build up to explosive outbursts of anger, which then again leaves you feeling bad and exposed to repeating exactly the same scenario. It almost entirely uses terminology and references from the world of computer science as a metaphor – a tongue in (somewhat) cheek reference to my day job as a software developer. The themes of infinite loops, recursion and stack overflows found in my daily life tied nicely with the idea I was trying to get across.
The subtitle is a call-back to the lead track of our previous album ‘Psychodramas’ which was named ‘The Anger of Anguish’. The inverse of this seemed extremely irrelevant for this track, a lament for my most unpleasant and unwanted personality trait.
2. A Circle Has No End
A Circle Has No End is just an outro to Cycles really, and has a title that somewhat relates to the infinite looping mentioned in the previous track. The title is lifted from one of my all time favourite book series, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, and is the final clue in a puzzle which sees our protagonists on a wild goose chase around the galaxy.
3. Pyroclastic Flow
Pyroclastic Flow is about… Pyroclastic Flow… which is the sudden explosion of hot gas and dust that occurs when a volcano erupts. I was inspired by my honeymoon trip to Pompeii the week before I started tracking the album. You know you are Doom Metal when a romantic trip to the Italian Riviera inspires you to pen a loving ballad about one’s internal organs being instantly liquefied.
Pompeii also allowed me to stand in the location of my favourite music film of all time, Pink Floyd’s Live at Pompeii, which was in itself massively influential on the earlier days of the band.
4. Singularity
Singularity is about being sucked into a black hole and having your soul crushed. Simple 🙂 After reading of Carcass’s approach to lyric writing – namely cribbing wholesale from medical dictionaries, I have occasionally used this technique as I enjoy the frankly daft results. This is possibly my favourite example of this technique. 90% of the lyrics of this song can be found in direct form in the Wikipedia article for Black Holes.
5. Nine Eternities
Nine Eternities is another interlude. This is an ambient piece salvaged from a piece of sound design I did back when studying Music Technology at university. Mostly made from heavily altered sounds created by trashing stuff in my flat. The piece had no title, so it was named in the studio after a line from a movie I had watched the day before we went in: The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
6. Euphoric Slumber
Euphoric Slumber is about drifting off to sleep in a warm fuzzy haze when you are real high. It is, appropriately an incredibly simple song that is 100% about trippiness and experimental FX and nothing else.
7. Sleeper Must Awaken Euphoric Slumber
Sleeper Must Awaken, Simon actually wrote the lyrics with little input from me. Apparently it is inspired by the writings of George Gurdjieff, who I was not familiar with. I provided the title however, which is from Dune.
This is probably the closest we’ve gone in aping my favourite band, the mighty Hawkwind, at least in the first section. It is also one of the first times I’ve played a quite traditional guitar solo. I’ve been playing guitar for 18 years, but have only recently become competent enough as a lead guitarist to really do much. This is something that continues to be expanded on in the songs I’ve written for the next album.
8. Extending Life, Expanding Consciousness
Extending Life, Expanding Consciousness is also from Dune. This is a piano/synth/noize arrangement of the end section of Sleeper Must Awaken. I particularly enjoy this form of noize making – feeding tracks gradually into FX sends, and slowly making the parameters crazier and crazier until everything goes insane. I’ve made whole albums of this kind of thing!
Camel of Doom:
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