Snake Mountain from North Rhine-Westphalia have been at this since 2015, starting as a two-person doom project and slowly expanding into a five-piece that added death metal to their foundation without losing the slow, grinding core that makes doom worth listening to. Man at Arms is four tracks, 23 minutes, and it makes the most of that running time by staying mean throughout.
The album’s title track opens proceedings with the kind of riff that sounds like the first note of a fight — heavy, deliberate, with the low-end weight of a band that has learned to play doom at the right speed, which is slower than you think you want and faster than the music sounds. “Violence” does exactly what it says: the tempo picks up slightly, the vocals push further into death metal territory, and the guitar tone gets dirtier. It’s the kind of track that announces intention rather than subtlety, and in this context that’s a feature, not a bug.
“Shizo Beast” is the album’s strangest corner, unsettled and aggressive in a way that doesn’t quite lock into the doom groove — it lurches. Whether that’s intentional is hard to say, but the effect is that it keeps you from settling in, which fits the album’s general commitment to discomfort. “Darkness of Solitude” closes things out with the record’s most atmospheric moment: slower, longer in feel, a genuine sense of space opening up in the low end. It’s the most traditional doom of the four tracks and lands the record on a note that feels earned.
This is old school doom at the production level too — nothing is over-polished, the guitars have real bite and the low end sits right at the front of the mix. When the songs speed up, you feel it as a gear change rather than a tempo shift. When they slow down, the riffs get heavier in feel even if not in volume — the kind of dynamics you get from players who know how to use pace as a tool. The death metal influence is mostly in the vocals and the occasional blast of energy in the mid-tracks; the bones of the record are still doom, still slow, still punishing.
Standout tracks: Man at Arms, Darkness of Solitude
Man at Arms is a solid, unpretentious doom-death record from a band that has been quietly developing its sound for a decade in the NRW underground. It’s not trying to be anything other than heavy, and on those terms it succeeds consistently.