Place of skulls-As a dog returns

2010


Guitarist/vocalist Victor Griffin is of course best known for his work in Pentagram. In recent years he has been at the helm of Place of skulls. For this effort he brings together the original Place of Skulls trio for. With Pentagram Griffin contributed some fantastic riffs and helped to carve the doom sound and influence many bands over the last twenty-five plus years. He still has that doom background in his sound, but he also obviously been drawn by or attracted to playing a more mellow sound this time around. I was actually somewhat shocked by how laid back several of the tracks. There are even a few ballads and the band seems comfortable with it. The musicianship is solid,but the ideas are merely decent and occasionally it gets bogged down upon itself. Griffin hits a few of the type of standard old style sludge/doom that you would expect from him. There are few guitarists who handle this style better than him, but there just isn't enough of it on this album for my liking. The lyrics are of the Christian variety as Victor is far from shy about singing out his words of praise. I am sure this is very much the album that Griffin and the rest of the band wanted to make, but it's all just a rather fair outing. I made it through and enjoyed some moment, but there certainly weren't enough memorable songs or even parts to make me want to return to it. Overall a slightly disappointing outing.