Reverend Bizarre: In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend (2002)
“Doom what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”
In the 1990s, while their Scandinavian neighbors in Sweden and Norway were becoming death and black metal superpowers, respectively, Finland was mostly churning out under-heralded funeral doom trawlers such as Skepticism, Shape of Despair and Thergothon, too extreme to attract a large following. (*)
But Reverend Bizarre, who also formed in the ‘90s but didn’t make serious inroads until the third millennium, were another breed of doom band, entirely.
A trio of Black Sabbath-worshipping traditionalists, they obeyed the style’s founding tenets, dating all the way back to 1970, sported very large crosses, posed sullenly in snow-covered graveyards, frequently referenced Aleister Crowley (as in the corrupted quote overhead), and loved evil goats!
That’s Spanish painter Francisco de Goya’s legendary Witches’ Sabbath gracing the cover of the Fins’ impressive long-form debut, 2002’s In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend, on which colorfully named singer/bassist Magister Albert, guitarist Peter Vicar, and drummer Earl of Void, treat every majestic mega-riff as though it were both the first and last they’d ever play.
In keeping with vintage doom, Albert doesn’t really mess with deathly grunts until second-to-last track, “Doomsower” (a tiny, five-minute anomaly), preferring to pack monolithic tracks like “Burn in Hell!” and “Sodoma Sunrise” with semi-operatic vocals and the occasional Ozzy or Lee Dorrian affectation.
Speaking of Dorrian, the thirteen-minute “In the Rectory" recalls the bloody-minded commitment of early Cathedral’s sheer, while the especially sorrowful “The Hour of Death” conveys the same sense of unmitigated, imminent dread espoused by British contemporaries Electric Wizard.
And the stubbornly snail-paced, 21-minute pièce de résistance “Cirith Ungol” may be the ultimate testament to Reverend Bizarre’s almost preposterous, monomaniacal doom worship, and it certainly helped In the Rectory of the Bizarre Reverend launch Reverend Bizarre onto the international doom stage.
Three years after this album’s release, I was fortunate to see Reverend Bizarre at Brooklyn’s sadly departed North Six Club -- one of the trio’s ultra-rare American concert appearances -- playing alongside November’s Doom and The Gates of Slumber.
* Amorphis, with their death-meets-folk innovations being one rare exception.
More Reverend Bizarre: Harbinger of Metal EP, II: Crush the Insects, III: So Long Suckers, Return to the Rectory EP.
