Saint Vitus - Born Too Late

Ding dong! Who could that be at the door, at this time no less? Why, it’s another visit from your good friends at Rock Song of the Week, bringing good news that’s not in the form of incredibly pushy and more than a little passive-aggressive conversion tactics. We’ve also got no encyclopaedias to sell you, but that’s mostly because I’ve just had to look up how to spell that word now, rather than an inherent lack of hustle. No, we’ve brought you another cracking track – but you might want to pop your moody boots on for this one. 

While everyone and their dad will tell you Black Sabbath brought doom metal to the world, they’re only tangentially wrong (the worst kind!). It was the wave of bands inspired by their downtuned and down-tempo brand of heavy metal that really kicked the subgenre off; your Candlemass, your Pentagram, your Trouble and, of course, your Saint Vitus, among others. Only most of them named themselves or a good chunk of their albums after Sabbath songs or lyrics, too! Of the “Big Four”, Saint Vitus were certainly the quieter of the bunch, remaining an underground influence for basically their entire career, but carving out a huge chunk of the emerging doom scene and having a profound impact on the many splinter genres like stoner rock and sludge rock without a big spotlight. Impressive stuff, though you’d have to think a big spotlight on a group with skin tones mostly ranging from vanilla to the sort of pale you imagine Dracula’s undercarriage to be wouldn’t go well anyway.

Make no mistake – blaring this out over your speakers isn’t going to cause a spontaneous flash dance to break out; at best, someone is calling an exorcist. This is the sort of low and slow burner that needs the most deliberate head nodding, and a lip turned up so far you can wrap it back over your own head. Born Too Late crushes along at an absolutely despondent pace, every down strum lasting for about an hour and pushing the bar as to just how deliberate metal can be. Yet with all that, it still has time for a screecher of a guitar solo along the way. In summation, it is as heavy as metal gets without a goat copping a very bad day. If this tidbit got you hungry for more, the band are still touring to this day and has released as many gloomy albums as you can shake a depressed stick at, so there really is no better time to turn to the dark side of metal and really get your doom on. Just make sure you’re back here next week so we can introduce you to something equally cool/potentially cheerier.