Band:	Sergeant Thunderhoof
Album:	The Ghost Of Badon Hill
Style:	Stoner metal
Release date:	November 15, 2024
A review by:	ScreamingSteelUS

01. Badon
02. Blood Moon
03. The Orb Of Octavia
04. Salvation For The Soul
05. Sentinel
06. Beyond The Hill

In ten years, Sergeant Thunderhoof have grown quite a bit, from a noisy, nasally stoner band doing the half-Sabbath/half-Sleep routine into a versatile practitioner of atmospheric, folkloric, and epic variants on the style. The Ghost Of Badon Hill is represented as “a true conceptual piece”, their most ambitious work yet, and I’d say that’s an accurate advertisement.

In a single sense, that may not be true, for The Ghost Of Badon Hill is only two-thirds the length of 2022’s This Sceptred Veil (in the number of tracks as well as the duration, so the shrinkage is proportional); this album is practically lean by comparison at a pretty standard 45 minutes. But when it comes to the effectiveness of the songwriting and the impact of its production, The Ghost Of Badon Hill is undoubtedly the product of a more experienced band. This Sceptred Veil was both the album that introduced me to Lieutenant Lightningfoot and the band’s deepest, most artistically mature work up to that point, expanding on the slight elaborations hypothesized by Terra Solus; it could take that standard stoner crunch and coax out its esoteric angles, divine the heroic mysteries that lay within the basic grooves, and turn those high, hazy vocal lines into soaring pronouncements of mythic manuscripts. Sometimes the new twists would result in a more sophisticated flavor of doom, sometimes they would pull the band toward rambunctious hard rock, and sometimes they would achieve the pastoral, lyrical quality of folk. All achieved very competently across the album, and yet sometimes at too great an expense: if there’s one criticism I could level at that album, it’s that its substantial run time can work against it, and at that point the modest eclecticism begins to resemble aimlessness.

Given the great capacity for immersive songcraft, however, and particularly the epic qualities of the album’s two-part closer, “Avon & Avalon”, Corporal Stormhands had clearly developed an excellent sound to experiment with, and The Ghost Of Badon Hill pursues the band’s capacity for creating that broad, atmospheric doomscape laden with legend. In this interview, frontman Dan Flitcroft describes the process of writing and recording for The Ghost Of Badon Hill as being stricter than that of This Sceptred Veil, with much more judicious cuts being made to the songs and overall album length; with this more efficient approach to writing and with the addition of longtime producer Josh Gallup as a second guitarist, the sound of Private Powerlegs has become one that hits harder and lasts longer.

Right off the bat, “Badon” gives us a much more massive sound than ever before, rising in a brilliant crescendo from a dark, acoustic introduction to a spacious and impactful truncheon of crashing riffs and percussion. It’s followed by “Blood Moon”, my favorite track on the album, a tense trudge on which Flitcroft delivers one of his most charismatic performances: this is a fine example of what Specialist Skyquakeboots can produce when its different sides align, with a dense, heavy drive balanced by a sense of depth and mystery. The final two tracks, “Sentinel” and “Beyond The Hill”, close out the album in quieter, more intimate quarters: while still electric and potent in their choruses, they allow the band to withdraw into a smaller scale and evoke a different sense of atmosphere. The album seems to fade out across the two tracks, too, with soft, opaque piano closing out "Sentinel" and “Beyond The Hill” introducing acoustic guitars to its slowly repeating riffs and shedding the distortion on the guitar leads, picking up reverb. The album exits with one ultimate tidal wave of riffage, now bolstered by keyboards, and lumbers through its final ghostly refrains before giving way to the sounds of chirping birds: it is as if the whole album had been a mirage of the past glimpsed on the ruins of an ancient battlefield. Badon Hill itself, perhaps.

In addition to fine-tuned compositions and production, The Ghost Of Badon Hill also offers a more fluid and consistent album experience than anything Admiral Astroboom has done before: this really is, as promised, a focused work, with great flow from song to song. The melodic stoner foundation, particularly the tone of the guitars and the flavorful leads – a highlight whenever they appear – reminds me of artists like Khemmis and Cathedral. Flitcroft’s vocals are another strong pillar: most often he utilizes ringing cleans, projecting a majestic weightlessness that sounds appropriate for echoing across misty moors during the album’s softer, folksy passages, but he does save something dirtier and more distorted for when the abrasive, crunchy riffs really kick in.

After the overtures toward folk influence on This Sceptred Veil and the promise of more on The Ghost Of Badon Hill, I was eager to hear Major Mistpouffermittens expand on the ancient aesthetics in a way that might draw them closer to bands like Solstice, Dark Forest, or Mael Mórdha; there is something about hearing the sense of temporal scale and cultural majesty that folk music exudes reconstituted in the form of a naturally immersive and heavy sound like doom metal that makes me appreciate each aspect all the more. This album is not as explicit in its traditional borrowings as such more recognizably folk-adjacent acts, with the affectations being largely lyrical and thematic, so I’m still hoping to hear more of that emerge sonically on a future work, but the acts I evoked as comparison in the previous paragraph are hardly insulting references, and this is surely Captain Crunchclaw’s tightest and most focused work so far.