Basically Candlemass if they went really sludgy, Italy’s Victims of Creation pose a familiar, yet somewhat craft doom take on their Symmetry of Our Plagued Existence album. One will have to side-step the noticeably lame cover art and contrived title before anything, but it’s readily apparent Victims of Creation have done their doom homework. Not like it’s hard…just keep Nightfall, the early My Dying Bride catalog, and perhaps some Cathedral handy. Tons of bands have built their careers off doing that.
Five songs in all here, meaning that maintaining sense of interest can be a trying event, most notably when the rather dull opening doom churns open up “Chapter XXIII.” Funeral doom this song is not, but by golly, it comes close. The old-styled death metal vocals of Rex (no, not Rex Brown, although that would be awesome) emerge as another divisive factor here. When he does the death thing, Victims of Creation are just another average death/doom band, but when he opens up with some clean vocals (see: “Tree of Iniquity”), there’s some room to work with.
The melodic caress of “The Glorious Deceit” and closer “Those Left Behind” end up bailing out Symmetry of Our Plagued Existence, a song with lots of nods to As the Flower Withers, which helps it stay in line with the right doom aesthetic. Yet, this one is a difficult lot to pick through; you’re getting really long songs, with ideas a lot of us have already heard. Not an indictment of Victims of Creation, just the way things are these days.