Doom Metal is mood music. This statement might seem weird to non-metal-aficionados whose gaze will often turn blank as metal fans disacate their bands into smaller and smaller enclosures of sub-genres and sub-sub-genres – for the true metal fan there is a vast chasm between Power Metal, Neoclassic Power Metal and symphonic Power Metal, and between those to Thrash metal (with its own sub-genres) there's a gap as wide as the grand canyon. The Sub-Genre Ahab belongs to is called doom metal, which means – slow tempo, downturned guitars, loooonnnng songs sound uniformity (songs tend not to offer much variety), guttural vocals and a dark (dark) attitude.
… So when I say Ahab plays a sort of mood music it is important for you to understand that the "mood" is the one you have when everything in your life wrong at once. If Goth Rock is, infamously, "music to cut your wrist to", than Doom Metal is "music to watch the world being destroyed to". As one can realize from the name of the band and album Ahab's gimmick is that they base their lyrical content of Moby Dick. It's a pretty solid gimmick for one album, though one must wonder how long can they keep it up, most metal bands with one lyrical theme at least try to pick a general one such as fantasy (Blind Guardian), Vikings (Ancient Rites) or pirates (Alestorm); a one book band might end up as a one album band.
But enough of side details – what of the music? Well its classic doom metal, which is, admitingly, not my thing: the songs go on and on and on and the lack of variety means you often can't notice when one ends and another begins. The attempt to set up a dark mood might have been possible if the band was an instrumental ensemble but growled vocals of singer - - - do a spectacular job of breaking the trance the music is trying to set, they're too aggressive and would fit better for a more traditional Death Metal band.
The sung lyrics are, naturally, undecipherable. In this type of music the vocals are closer to another instrument than a tool to express ideas via words, but as I mentioned they are simply unsuitable for their purpose here. The lyrics, for most part, are taken directly from Melville but they are as one note as the music – ponderous. Moby Dick beauty is in its breadth – in being a novel of many types and many modes; it's funny and tragic, adventurous and moody, its realistic in parts and melodramatic in others, it has a large cast of characters, each with its own personality. The problem with the music of Ahab is the way they narrowed down the entire book not just to one character, but to one aspect of that one character: their Ahab is all tragedy, without any added features.
I guess I could say that Ahab are good "for their type" which is a phrase critics use when they aren’t sure if what they witnessed is "bad" or simply out their sphere. But I believe a good work of art transcends its genre, and can appeal even to those who are not fans – and Call of the Wretched Sea fails this test.
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