Vokonis

THE SUNKEN DJINN

Clocking in at 40 minutes for just seven songs, Vokonis’s second album certainly doesn’t eschew the doom genre’s love of following any musical idea to its indulgent conclusion and then living there. But that’s the only area in which The Sunken Djinn is business as usual. Evolving from the more traditional doom of their debut, this follow-up is an enticing intersection of that genre and stoner rock, taking the tones and atmosphere of the former and blending it with the groove and guitar exhibitionism of the latter. Tracks like

Architect Of Despair come on like Baroness after a heavy weekend in Amsterdam, with walls of foreboding straddling more traditional stoner rhythms, albeit at half the pace. The sheer scale of Vokonis’s noise is made all the more impressive by the fact that there’s only three of them. A bludgeoning, noise-drenched take on melodic doom.