Lycus is a funeral doom or black doom metal band from Oakland, California, US. They have only two albums and a demo released as of now and I plan to review their newest album, Chasms, later on as well. Despite being a funeral doom metal band, they say they have alot of other influences as well in their category and are known for some pretty long, epic tracks.
Tempest is only forty minutes in length, which is incredibly short, but has a counteraction of three tracks, one that is eleven minutes, one mine minutes and the epic title track being twenty minutes. Within these three tracks and forty minutes worth of music we get alot beautiful and often times repetitive riffs. There is a counter to the high amounts of repetition however, this can include making notes sound more crunchy and heavier, playing a different note or maybe sometimes having a different drum pattern but those are minor and can be hard to notice sometimes unless you're really paying attention. There are also times when they fit in black metal elements into the music and from what I've counted, there has been two, one in the eleven minute track and another in the title track. The atmosphere on this one is surprisingly fitting despite not being as slow as most other funeral doom bands like Ahab or sometimes Swallow The Sun. It builds up as the song goes on and reaches it's peak towards the end but doesn't slow down, almost like your average drone/drone metal song. I can't really speak of too much here as I couldn't find alot to talk about here. If I did have one problem, it would be the album is way too short in my opinion. Forty minutes is something that I can easily listen to straight through and it doesn't work very well in my opinion for doom metal, although I do realize it was exactly like that in the 80s, but I will let that slide as it was a new genre at the time.
I give this a 9.5/10. I am the Grim Reaper, signing off.