Audio By Carbonatix
For those unfamiliar with the latest wave of post-rock doom metal, here’s a quick debriefing: Imagine slowed-down Black Sabbath riffs with all the drama of an orchestra, more power than melody, and completely drenched in tube-driven thickness. It’s in this realm that South Florida’s Coffin Dancer sounds off, adding its 2 cents to this trend on the CD EP Pax Romana.
The disc starts out with the psychedelic swirl of “Revolt of the Proletariat,” a meandering instrumental piece that slowly builds around delayed, stripped-down, clean-tone guitars, into a twisting mélange of rhythmic undulations and heavy distortion. David Lopez, formerly of Laramie Dean’s Surf Punk Machine, makes his vocal entrance on “Another March to Cavalry,” a slow burner that wends its way through atmospheric ascensions and pit-of-the-belly screams, leading the listener to the finale, “Auto da fe,” a nearly 13-minute affair, chock-full with scraping strings; guttural pleadings; quiet, barely there moments; and tribal tom-rolling, courtesy of drummer Nicky Cedeno. In line with this collector-driven genre, the album is beautifully packaged in a hand-silk-screened cardboard box with a like-minded insert. Fans of Isis would do well to check out this latest addition to South Florida’s burgeoning metal scene.
