Yeah, it seems kind of corny to talk of a “dream team” existing in doom’s dark, colorless realm but, shit, just consider Serpentine Path’s personnel. You’ve got Tim Bagshaw, guitarist for saturnine UK doom crew Ramesses and a founding member of Electric Wizard, jamming with entire crew of the now (sadly) defunct Unearthly Trance, Jay Newman on bass, Darren Verni on drums and Ryan Lipynsky on vocals. Seriously, there’s got to be some kind of magick at play.
It’s enough to put your faith in those breathless urban myths that tell of an all-seeing doom metal impresario who lives out there in the ‘burbs, sending out commandments from an oak and rawhide easy chair in his front room. A cloaked individual, unseen to the public, he is said to have started life as a moderator on an underground doom forum until he attained superpowers after accidentally microwaving a rival’s copy of the Electric Wizard/Reverand Bizarre 7″ split. And now, reclusive of all human contact save for the mail man, this omnipotent, omniscient doom seer is pulling strings in the scene. Like, obviously Serpentine Path hooked up through shared musical outlooks, the members meeting on tour when Ramesses shared van space with Unearthly Trance back in 2009, but still: For all of us super-bummed out when U.T. called it a day this is a kind of freaky Pet Sematary reincarnation of what was a great band.
Serpentine Path take the riffs down low and contort them into the sort of dirges that make confetti of inferior speaker cones, and you’d expect nothing less. Anyway, here’s an exclusive preview of the superlative “Obsoletion”, taken from the band’s self-titled debut.
Serpentine Path is out through Relapse on September 11th in the States, the 17th everywhere else.
**You can poke Serpentine Path on Facebook HERE. And you can order it HERE. Don’t dare disappoint the Doom Lord; his microwave still works.**
