DOOM! It’s the sound of now. Do you turn on the telly and every other story’s telling you several thousand people died? Notice that certain major cities are now big fucking lakes full of chemical sludge, human excrement and the floating corpses of lynched rapists?

Feel like Muslim fuckheads, Christian asswipes, Neo-con murderers and pseudo-liberal, shit-eating, hippy-fascist scum are trying to take all your rights away and tell you how to live? See the world moving towards total war? Do you WANT total war? Sure you do, and that’s why DOOM is the sound of our times, children. It’s slow, it’s miserable and it rocks like a bastard.

Khanate are the DOOM purists here. They stick rigidly to the black blueprint of early Swans via Black Flag’s goth phase via Sabbath via Entombed via St Vitus: sloooooooooooooow riffs and yelled/gasped vocals. The only bit I could decipher from the general screaming and despair goes, “All that you are is on the ground!” There are two tracks and they go on forever.

If you’re a pussy, this album will be too much for you. If you have a warped sense of humour, you’ll like it. If your whole life is pain and you want others to suffer too… you’ll love it!

‘Power ambient’ duo Sunn O))) (Pronounced Sun Ooooh. Obviously.) are the DOOM innovators. Sharing personnel with Khanate, Thorr’s Hammer and other DOOMinaries, they’ve worked with Merzbow and his electronic ear-shredding devices, and commanded Julian Cope to pay homage to them on their own record (“Play your gloom axe, Stephen O’Malley/Sub-bass resounding off the sides of the valley,” Copey intones).

This isn’t quite as good as their monumental Flight Of The Behemoth CD, but its mix of eyeball-vibrating bass and feedback that’s warped and crafted into a magical tapestry of DOOM makes Black 1 easily one of this year’s best experimental metal albums.

And finally – and yet also first – Earth are the DOOM originators. But though the DOOMinati love their Earth 2 album and Sunn O))) take their name from one of their albums, Earth were always a bit of a joke when they helped forge the genre – Sabbath without Iommi’s killer riffs, or Swans without Gira’s existential rage-poetry.

They’ve since moved into new areas, with only a residual bit of DOOM going on. The sleevenotes for Hex… reference Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack and that’s possibly a tactical error. You see, with its dramatic, reverberant guitar lines tumbling in slow motion into each other and gradually decaying, it’s so like Dead Man, it’s actually moving into the realms of ‘homage’.

If you ever needed a sequel to Young’s only decent album, this is it. But it’s not really DOOM. And if it ain’t DOOM, we ain’t got room. Dig?