rituals
shEver's Rituals is the best no frills, straightforward Doom Metal album for some time. The Swiss group owe much to the British wave of Death-Doom that spawned Paradise Lost, My Dying Bride and Anathema, but while they demonstrate textural adventurousness via subtle variations of guitar sound and vocal style, they resist the urge to overload their immense, compulsive riffs with Gothic frippery (choirs, keyboards and so forth) and instead take delight in their own corpse-dredging heaviness. These atavistic urges are balanced by their propensity for writing well-constructed, memorable songs, which is something of a lost art in Metal.