The Munsens are one of the last cool things since doom stopped being cool. Alright now, between me and you, doom has never been cool and that might as well be the best thing about it. No forced fans, no dressed up clowns as the ones you can find in your regular NWBHM festival. But around the end of 2014-2015 it gained quite a lot of attention, even from more mainstream metal magazines and not only. All of this hugely due to Electric Wizard's mainstream success. You start going to your typical classic metal festivals and find people in flares, talking about how great Reverend Bizarre are. What the hell was that, the zombie apocalypse finally unleashing? On one hand, that's good for the music - more fans, more people get inspired to create music and so on. However, this of course brought with itself a thousand female-fronted "retro" bands (now who will be the first to say I am sexist), cheesy vocals, mall chicks into fashion thinking they are super retro and posting more selfies on instagram than I could count. But hey, even that's fine with me, as long as there's a lot of good music out there. But guess what, everything in life is cyclic and the waters of doom got stuck in the swamp of unoriginality. Waiting for maybe a different time to return with full power?
The Munsens have the old breed. They play this slow, super slow, out of their gut wretched doom metal that I happened to treasure dearly. When you say to someone who is not a classic doom fan - this is "slow metal", in their head that usually means 'regular'. No. The Munsens are slower than that. Bad quality of music but good bad. And if you're reading this, you do probably know what I mean. No stupid polishes, everything is served raw. "Abbey rose"'s cover artwork is only black and white and so is the music behind it. The scenery it depicts reminds you of a London street where Jack the Ripper might show from around the corner and great you with his knife. These bleak sceneries somehow perfectly link with the down-tuned guitars and bass induced sound. No positive vibes, just the perfect recipe for a very nihilistic doom. This being in no way old school death, I was thinking that there are some similarities though, in the kind of taste this EP leaves in your mouth. The sound is very simple, in fact, a mediocre amateur musician like me can hear the riffs pretty accurately, masked by some thick delay and reverse. You could record this with your Blackstar and a pedal but that doesn't make it any bit less atmospheric. Would recommend it for fans of Windhand, Graves at Sea.
If you happen to have the first EPs too, I think in comparison Abbey Rose is even better. Already being a huge fan of "Weight of the night" and "Slave", I can easily tell that Abbey is catchy after only the first listen, while it takes some time for the first two EPs to grow on you. One idea less raw and garagy. Hands down, one of my top 3 releases for 2016.
https://themunsensnj.bandcamp.com/
https://themunsensnj.bandcamp.com/
