Welcome to the latest edition of “Freeloader” in which we review albums that you don’t have to feel like a douche for downloading for free. Today Satan Rosenbloom checks out the latest from Hesper Payne.

There’s more to proper doom metal than guitars tuned down to Z and anaesthetized wooly mammoth paces. You gotta have feel if you’re gonna rise from the muck. Actually, that’s a bad metaphor. Doom metal belongs in the muck. But the best doom is more than just a bummer. It’s an air-sucking slowing down of the world to its own pace, a convincing that there is no point in moving any quicker – the blackness is coming to get you, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, so you better just revel in it. Burning Witch got that. Winter got that. Corrupted and Electric Wizard and Samothrace get that. And Coventry, England’s Hesper Payne sure as fuck get that.

From Hesper Payne’s formation in 2004 up until the recording of Unclean Rituals, the band was essentially the solo project of one Brooke Johnson, an avowed Cathedral/Celtic Frost/Morbid Angel-obsessed musician from Newcastle with some fifteen active metal and metallish projects going at the moment. Johnson’s also a founder of Works of Ein, the digital-only “unlabel” that releases all of Hesper Payne’s stuff for free (not to mention the AMAZING debut record by Contaigeon, one of my favorite albums of 2010).

Johnson’s a busy man, but the law of diminishing returns doesn’t apply to Unclean Rituals in the slightest. If anything, the album benefits from a surplus of sounds and ideas. Khanate this ain’t – every fetid inch of “Empty Emperor” and “Doom from the Cursed North” is stuffed with bonecrush or mindwarp, usually both. Johnson’s Cathedral fetish gets plenty of airing in the woozy psychedelic tinges adorning songs like “Hesper Payne,” “Mirthless Dirge of the Toadstool Druid” and “Sarkless Kitty’s Weeping.” The influence is more totemic than slavish though. Hesper Payne trip on their own strain of acid. The bizarre guitar harmonies, saturating keyboard beds and kisses of dissonance add up to a ton of personality, and more to listen to than a doom band oughta have.

Johnson’s songs, narrated in at least four distinct vocal styles, tend towards things Lovecraftian and English folklore. And while he deals with tales of twisted lust (“The Maiden and the Mariner”) and deathly sea shanties (“The Derelict Alert”) with a folksy storyteller’s brio that’s foreign to most metal lyricists, he takes a less directly folkloric approach to the music on Unclean Rituals. There’s no hurdy-gurdy or tabor to be heard. Instead, Hesper Payne erect the kinds of riffs that you can imagine still standing somewhere in northwestern England in 2000 years, covered in moss, spackled in blood, holding the same mysterious, mythic potency that they’ve got now. Unclean Rituals is doom for the ages.

(4 horns up outta 5)

-SR

Download Unclean Rituals here.