Doom

Total Doom (2002)

feeeding5000

Doom is certainly a band that's built a reputation. If you see someone on the street with a Doom t-shirt on, you'll probably walk as far away from him or her as possible, mostly to avoid the stench. Or, if the person is female, and you're like me, you'll probably spend a disturbingly long amount of time staring at that person, and then you'll look her in the eye, and she'll immediately start walking away from you very quickly. But I digress.

I found Total Doom, surprisingly enough, at a chain CD store in a shopping mall. The sticker on the CD read "Doom is the best ‘80's Grind since Discharge." Well, they did compare it to Discharge, which is totally necessary, because Doom is, first and foremost, a D-Beat band. However, this means that Peaceville Records, a metal label that was instrumental in the creation of U.K. crust (and released albums by the likes of Deviated Instinct, Electro Hippies, and Axegrinder, among others), is deliberately trying to pass this off as "grind," a subgenre of heavy metal, as opposed to "hardcore," which would be a subgenre of punk. While this may just be an attempt to get interest from Peaceville's regular customers, it may just be an issue of semantics.

In any case, Total Doom is a collection of Doom's first EP, Police Bastard, their first LP, War Crimes -- Inhuman Beings, and their side of a split LP, Bury the Debt, Not the Dead. This is pretty much 37 tracks of faster, more bass-heavy Discharge worship -- and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm a relatively big Discharge fan, so I can appreciate a late ‘80s D-Beat album with more power than the early Varukers songs. The vocals are completely unintelligible, like grind-core progenitors Napalm Death. Every so often you can make out a few words, usually ones like "fuck," "bastard," and "die." The grind designation does work well for one song, "Circles," which is played considerably faster than the rest of the CD.

The CD is in a digipak, which is still the greatest CD case ever invented, and it contains some liner notes, photos, and original album art. Unfortunately, the metalhead bastards at Peaceville skipped on a booklet, so you can't even read the unintelligible lyrics.

So, basically, this is not bad. Not bad at all. A good compilation, and probably some of Doom's best work. Also, probably the most easily available of their CD's. Uhh…up the punx.