Band:	Monarch
Album:	666
Style:	Drone doom metal
Release date:	2005

Disc I
01. Dead Men Tell No Tales
02. Somewhere Below The Devil Is Laughing

Disc II
01. Les Lumières Have Been Blown Out

While the Black Metal scene has been very notorious for its history and rawness, the extreme offspring of modern doom metal has not been far away from such a cult ranking. On one side of the fence - we had bands with corpse paint who with their dark and raw sound sang about Satanism, Anti-Christianity and grimness. Other stories tell us that they also burned churches, committed suicide (Dead) and killed their band mates (Varg VS Euronymous). However, on the other side of the fence we also have the new wave of super ultra extreme doom bands that were never taught the word "compromise" in school. While their sound is as slow, dark, hateful and raw as possible - these guys spit out their disgust towards mankind, their cold and sorrowful emotions and sometimes their almost nihilistic ideas. Different sources tell us that most of these bands never play on stage, many of them remain unsigned to any label, a handful of them disband after only releasing their first couple of EP´s and some of them also like the idea of killing themselves (fucked up Mad Max).

In the battle of who is the grimmest, rawest, kvltest and tr00est, Monarch is like Johan Cruyff scoring for the doomed infants. In this battle, there are not many bands that manage to have such raw, harsh and demolishing sound as Monarch.

The debut album takes us into a hybrid of coldness and solitude. As if you were sitting in an icy whirlpool, the album drowns you down into "the land of nothingness". Mesmerising riffs are combined with insane shrieking vocals by a woman?? Yeah you heard right, the vocalist is actually a chick (which is hard to believe). The debut self-titled album is 3 songs on 2 CDs. I guess only this can give you an idea of how ultra slow the songs are. Most people will most certainly call this record extremely boring and repetitive. But for what I know, I don't really think that this album was ever produced to be embraced by the mainstream ears.

In short, Monarch is like poison to the ear of "romantic" doom metal fans or those doomsters who like their doom metal to be easy listening, melodic and perhaps also contain some up tempo passages here and there. Monarch does NOT make this kind of compromises; the music is slow and harsh beyond any sort of limits. If you like this kind of music, then look no further, here you have your album.