1. Earth: The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull (2008)
I can not get enough of this album. The perfect doomy-chill dose of ambiance for a cold December’s night. I will throw it on and pick up a book, or write some notes awash in a sleepy sea of somnambulistic sedation!I throw it on and sleep away, and awake at night to hear its sleepy rotation, and fall asleep again.
2. Swallow the Sun: The Morning Never Came (2003)
Our drummer Adam once remarked upon hearing this album: “This makes me want to jump off a bridge.” How can you take that in a good way? Well, this delectable dose of Finnish doom from the nether regions of Keski-Suomi makes it work. It’s so miserably sad that it’s stunningly beautiful (if that makes sense). Melodic passages creep by in agonizing bliss. Let the snow fall all night and keep this on repeat.
3. Dissection: Storm of the Light’s Bane (1995)
I remember walking across the former “Niemansland” that was Stadt-Mitte in Berlin in 1997, while it was a wasteland of construction, and the Sony Center of today was nothing a but a big hole. The wind was blazing through the neon-hinged darkness, and the snow was coming down in bullets. I had my cassette walk-man on, raging this album, and NOTHING sounded, or stills sounds, as much like a walk in a freezing winter storm than the cold riffs that comprise “Thorns of Crimson Death.” Epic X 10,000.
4. Black Mountain: In the Future (2008)
These Vancouver, BC doomy-indie-whatever rockers sound to me like the bastard child of Black Sabbath and PJ Harvey. That of course makes no sense, but either way, I love it, and the double-vinyl I have at home spins away the hours of the evening while the ice flowers form in sheets across my window.
5. Kylesa: Static Tensions (2009)
The opening and secondary riffage on “Unknown Awareness” haunts away the hours around 3:15 AM. A nocturnal bulldozer that although originating in Savannah, reeks heavily of tundra to my Mid-Atlantic ears.





