It's OK if you need to laugh at Hour of 13: From their horror movie name to their most remarkable press photo, in which a pale, naked woman with her back to the camera kneels as if to worship at the altar of the band above her, the North Carolina classic doom squadron leans heavily upon the itinerant gestures of its genre. Frontman Phil Swanson's piercing wail pairs high-flying Ozzyisms with theatric harmonies and verses so pensive you'd swear he was cupping a chalice. Arranger and multi-instrumentalist Chad Davis wraps massive, squealing solos through most every space he can. It's a sound that Jack Black might conjure for his next rock'n'roll hero. Meanwhile, the title and cover of Hour of 13's latest and third album, 333, both seem custom-crafted by a marketing firm you'd never hire: "Let's cut the Number of the Beast in half, because everyone loves a good Crowley reference, etch it into a big-jawed skull lit by candlelight, and put it in the middle of three gold-embossed triangles. And don't forget the freak-show font. Those dark kids will just love it."
While their gestures and symbols are inarguably mawkish and predictable, even in a field with an unending history of such, Hour of 13's swill of lurching Saint Vitus-style doom and gymnastic New Wave of British Heavy Metal technique makes the band itself a rarity-- an act evidently reverent to its stylistic forebears but energized as if they'd invented this music themselves. "Deny the Cross" takes the lead for 333; it's a passionate, dynamic expanse, shifting between moments of head-banging rumble and psychedelic smear. On "Rite of Samhain", Davis inlays crisscrossing guitars above a basic rhythm section, a prototypical doomy chug offset by kinetic bursts cutting constantly through the track. Swanson's voice is masterful, occasionally doubling and tripling itself to foster a sense of spectacle. The duo's transitions-- whether a basic drum fill or quick and extended guitar lick-- serve these songs well, too, helping the pieces Davis and Swanson put together actually stay that way.
Indeed, Hour of 13's most audacious tracks are, at least on 333, also their best. "Lucky Bones" and "The Burning", the two multi-part tunes that break the eight-minute mark, overcome the obvious stylistic touchstones from sheer force of will, allowing the disbelief-- an American crew in 2012, making this music so well, in the South-- not to be simply suspended but almost forgotten altogether. After a compelling intro that touches at the edge of stoner metal, "The Burning" lets Swanson set up his story-- essentially, the cost of sin is damnation, and now you are burning, so whatever, mortal. The song's middle third picks up the pace to, if you will, turn up the heat on the same topic. "Divorced from salvation," Swanson sings over one of the record's best sprints, "into damnation." The shift in speed works, somehow making Swanson's warning about an embroiled eternity seem great-- the kind of stuff that, several decades ago, you might've pumped your fist to in an outsized arena. Closer "Lucky Bones" triggers back and forth between mid-tempo quake, squealing solos, and an inescapable chorus, with several short, forlorn sections lending appropriate gravity to the song's observations on burial, or being "given to the dust." Again, these sprawls work because they're so very immersive, temporarily beating back Hour of 13's revivalist stigma.
But if this music already exists within a canon so well-established to not only have classics but successors who have pushed those sounds into dizzying new realms, why bother listening to it? It's a query that 333 refuses to approach or ease; there are no nods to funeral doom, noise or abstraction at large here, no post-modern referents to prompt lengthy features in The New York Times or the New Yorker. Hour of 13-- or at least this lineup, featuring Swanson and Davis-- broke up and reunited since the release of their 2010 album, The Ritualist. Swanson temporarily yielded the frontman throne. It's nearly possible to perceive that difficult delivery here within the enthusiasm and earnestness with which these seven songs are offered; Swanson and Davis play them hard, fast, and fun, a quality that might just be the record's chief surprise. In playing these tunes like they nearly never recorded them, Hour of 13 recharge the music of Cathedral, Candlemass, and Pentagram rather than simply remake it.
