Church Of Misery
The black mass is always in service for Japanese doomsters
Church of Misery party like it’s 1979. So says their bell-bottoms, long hair and strange obsession with infamous serial killers. While they devote every album, song and lyric to characters like Richard Ramirez and Richard Trenton Chase, guitarist Tom Sutton claims his band doesn’t waste every waking hour drooling over the next big psychopath. “It’s actually not a big thing to me, to be honest. It’s not like we sit around talking about serial killers all day at band practice and stuff. It’s what a lot of the songs are about and it gives us a really great theme to work with.”
What? A band that seems to only care for ’70s rock ‘n’ roll and blood-sucking freaks is potentially duping us? Church have never written songs on their albums that weren’t dedicated to psychopathic celebrities. But Sutton hears this hoo-ha too much. “To me, the songs, riffs and stuff are way more important than that,” he asserts. “But then, other people say, ‘Oh no, that’s just really a big defining point about you guys.’”
He’s right. There’s much more substance past repeated lyrics like “I, motherfucker.” There’s a basic formula to every Church album, which they have yet to break. A handful of serial killer identities, each more gruesome than previous batches: check. Applicable clips of news broadcasts about aforementioned serial killers: check. And one cover song to pay sweet homage to a doom metal grandfather: check.
These elements fashion their latest, Houses of the Unholy, suiting their defiant rock ‘n’ roll mentality that he says wavers somewhere between the aggressive Sleep and free-spirited Captain Beyond. “I think if you listen to [our] ’90s stuff, it sounds like it’s wearing boots. When slow, it’s fantastic. But when it tries to run, it doesn’t have the fleet-footedness. Especially on The Second Coming and then on [Houses of the Unholy], when the band busts into some more like ’70s hard rock-y stuff, it sounds more fluid. Before, it was more thumping.”
There’s no telling where exactly this Tokyo-based quartet fits. “There weren’t any bands that sounded like this in the ’70s. If we had been around in the ’70s, people would’ve been like, ‘Oh fucking hell, why is this guy shouting so much?’”
Still, Sutton claims they don’t really identify with fellow Japanese doom monsters, like Corrupted or Eternal Elysium… not that it bothers him one bit. “Like Cathedral on their album The Ethereal Mirror, they’re wearing ’70s clothes like bell-bottoms. I think that was one off the first bands of that era to do that, really. I think from then, people started looking backwards. But how different can rock go now? It’s time to let go of progression in sound and concentrate on writing great songs that have meaning to us.”
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