Music Review: The Howling Void Megaliths of the Abyss/Shadows over the Cosmos

There’s very little information about The Howling Void available on-line, except that it is a one-man doom metal project from San Antonio, Texas. There are two Howling Void albums, one from 2009(Megaliths of The Abyss) and Shadows over the Cosmos from 2010. The Howling Void appeared on late 2010-eary 2011’s on the Doom Metal collection of the Metalhit Free Download Series, which is completely quintessential set of MP3 compilations. When I came across those compilations. That really was for me the first exposure to a lot of bands and general pockets of metal I had been unaware of.
Each of the two Howling Void albums are composed of a few lengthy tracks of slow, foreboding metal. He does the whole deep growling death metal vocal thing, so the lyrics are indecipherable. The keyboards are a little bit more evocative of something out of black metal, Joy Division’s Closer album or the incidental score to a horror film. Of course the church bell sound is there. How could it not be? The term I’ve read to describe this music is funeral symphonic doom metal. When they get into all the little subgenres of metal it gets a little bit silly, but this music is legitimately foreboding and grandiose. There isn’t a lot of variance on a Howling Void album, but there isn’t that much need for any, as I see it. The Howling Void accomplishes what it seeks to accomplish in establishing an atmospheric backdrop of doom.
Make no mistake, this is a very aggressive music, he’s got the amp turned up all the way on the guitars, there are keyboard sounds are layered over that, with of course the church bell sounds and the samples of falling rain, etc. There are other bands that sound like this, roughly. The bands Colosseum and Skepticism, for example, have a similar sound to Howling Void. Still, the doom metal genre resembles closely nothing you’re likely to ever hear within our general pop culture, it exists as a definite musical extreme or margin.
The Howling Void and other musical artist like The Howling Void, the funeral symphonic doom metal genre if you want to call them that, that’s all fine by me as a musical backdrop. It works.