DOOM IS THE NEW AMBIENT

...and that's why I don't like it.

I do most of my music listening a) through headphones and b) while working, or while striding purposefully or otherwise traveling from place to place. Doom doesn't help with either of these things. Try listening to Electric Wizard's "Supercoven," never mind something like Orthodox's Gran Poder (which arrived in the mail the other day, and which inspired this post), on the train - you'll fall dead asleep. As I type these words, "Geryon's Throne," the first track on Gran Poder, is finally ending, just shy of 28 minutes after I pressed Play. It's not bad stuff - the vocalist sounds a lot like Buzz Osborne, and the guitars are pretty great, even if the drummer is, like many of his doom brethren, way too cymbal-happy. (I hate cymbals, but I understand the impulse to hit 'em, especially when the beats are so slow and sparse - you gotta remind the listener, and maybe even your bandmates, that you're back there, right?) But it demands to be played through speakers, so it can properly fill the room. And if a song's 28 minutes long (or 75 minutes long, in the case of, say, the second disc of Corrupted's Llenandose De Gusanos), that demands a passivity from the listener, a willingness to surrender to the music, that frankly my lifestyle just doesn't permit. I'm a busy guy. I want short, fast, punchy. I want Agoraphobic Nosebleed. Or Ornette Coleman's Atlantic albums. Or anything else that's gonna keep me up, up, up. Perhaps I'll hang on to all these doom records I keep getting in the mail - and one day, when I've made enough money that I can loaf around all day and crank up the stereo, I'll slap some of 'em on and drift away for hours on a sea of booming downtuned riffage. But right now, I just don't have the time.