They Say :- Conan hail from the grim North West of England. Three men bear the wretched burden of this abyssal, droning, charging heaviness. Through yawning chasms and bleak devastated battlefields they deliver riffs and tone so grim and so thick that the Gods turn away, to avoid suffocating under the band’s unearthly delivery.
They have committed their filthy, ocean-sized sound to wax (and the slightly less cvlt compact disc) twice thus far- with more fetid output always on the horizon. First came the hulking mass of debut album Horseback Battle Hammer (Throne, Aurora Borealis), followed by a split with like-minded sludge-lords, Slomatics (Head of Crom, Burning World).
We Say :- Ohhh, let the journalistic cliches flow. Nothing brings them out quite like heavy, and I do mean HEAVY, metal.
Of course, here at CackBlabbath we avoid cliches like the plague 
OK, so it may not possible, ordinarily, to turn innards to jelly or flatten buildings with sludgy bottom end and down tuned riffs. But if it was then Conan would certainly be leaving a shattered trail of destruction in their wake. Heavy hardly seems adequate for their grim, crushing sludgey doom metal.
Subtlety and variation don’t feature highly in the Conan vocabulary. From start to finish Monnos is a brutal, almost overpowering, assault on the senses. It’s a music built on a foundation of a heavy, distorted bottom end which almost entirely divests itself of any unnecessary flourishes. There’s something unstoppable, something relentless about it, almost glacially slow and equally heavy complimented by vocals which, at times, veer almost into into the monastic.
To top everything off, Chris Fielding’s production job works beautifully. Everything is cloaked in a distorted, sludgy atmosphere without ever sounding flat or compromising the overall down and dirty, earthy feel. If you want your Doom properly heavy, then Conan do not disappoint, and in Monnos they have unleashed an awesome display of riff laden power.
Makes Black Sabbath sound like a thrash band.
Related posts:
