Godlike Snake-Ufomammut

If you’ve started reading this, you can’t stop now, this is stoner/doom metal country and your driver is Ufomammut. I came across Ufomammut while searching for stoner/doom metal bands with a far more psychedelic tone to them than your general stoner/doom band. That being said, this band definitely defines what I, and I’m sure plenty of others, would think of when they first hear the name Psychedelic Doom. Not stoner/doom, PSYCHEDELIC Doom. Get ready for a trip, kids, cos with this debut from Italian stoner/doom metallers/graphic designers, you’re going to trip HARD.

We can't stop now...but those riffs maaaaaan, THOSE RIFFS. If there's anything I
learned, never turn your back on a man in the middle of a doom metal binge.

While the band plays very psychedelia-influenced doom, the riffs are straight up stoner/doom. There is a prominent Sleep and Electric Wizard influence here: the extremely distorted, down-tuned, and monolithically heavy riffs, with some occasional nods to the blues, played at a slow pace. Obviously what makes Ufomammut different from those bands is the oscillating, psychedelic synths, distortions, and samples that stick the stoner/doom riffs together to create a tide-like psychedelic experience. Sometimes these synths and samples become the main focus, going on without riffs for minutes, moving in and out and creating a hovering, drone-like feeling. Now while it is psychedelic, the overall music does tend to cater to a darker, more sinister side of the stoner/psychedelic genre. There are a lot of moments where Godlike Snake creates a dark and frightening atmosphere by showcasing down-tuned and ominously-melodied heavy riffs over wavy, dissonant, psychedelic fuzz. However, some of the more fun and wholesome aspects of stoner music are not lost, giving the music a chilled element here and there and not letting it become too much like the metal equivalent of a bad trip. While the album amasses trippy synths and sinister guitars, the vocals are also your general stoner/doom variety: soared chants drenched in reverb, distortion and echo/delay that decently emulate how someone tripping might hear voices.

Lyrically, Ufomammut deals with topics ranging from the typical tripping/drug themes to more frightening, but not exactly unfitting, topics such as being abducted by aliens and being visited by the devil. Even though the lyrics are hard to decipher due to the effect-drenched vocals, reading them along with the record does help increase the whole scary/bad trip sort of atmosphere the album is notable for creating at times. The production is fairly raw, for stoner/doom at least, but it does help to maintain the fuzzy dissonance that so helps the dark trip element of Godlike Snake. The vocals are generally not as loud as the rest of the band, but other than that it’s just a matter of keeping the fuzz prominent in the music, meaning the guitars and synths have a far more noticeable presence. Godlike Snake’s overall pace is, as usual with doom, slow and chunky while the extra droning effect of the synths and vocals makes the album feel way slower. The average song length on here tends to be 5 or 6 minutes, which I think aids the music since some stoner/doom stuff (other than the gods Sleep or Electric Wizard) tends to plod on and become boring. But since Ufomammut sticks with regularly paced songs for most of the album, it makes the only really monolithic song, Hozomeen (which is around 20 minutes long), more endurable because it’s later in the album and by then you haven’t been bored to death by several other half-hour songs.