The cold, very real, wet cherry blossom and maple leaf squishy streets of Portland were my home for decades but it wasn’t until I moved to Seattle that I discovered the street-walkin’ lady-pants doom rock of RIP. The lightly serious Ozz-ified echo and swagger of ‘In the Wind’ didn’t fully showcase the Pentagram-with-a-beer live experience of the band. By most accounts it was average doomin’ grooves and something we’d all heard before. I rated it pretty highly knowing what a strong set of street jammers they were and for a debut out of nowhere it showed more promise than a lot of the self-serious masturbation prone doom of 2016. Here we are with a second album a year later and true personality of the band is on full display.

If I said this was the most psycho-millennial doom record of all time you’d probably punch me in the neck. It isn’t that but the tone is what a lot of folks are calling “party metal” which kinda gives me diarrhea thinking anyone might overlook this very solid rockin’ doom metal record because it is marketed as less than seriously good heavy metal. Where I trace it’s influence, and place in metal history noire, is that sweet jogging proto-metal spookification that is Pentagram‘s hooky-catchy demo archives and the speedier Saint Vitus record ‘Hallow’s Eve’ by way of Dave Chandler’s brilliant but forgotten Debris Inc. self-titled doom/punk record. Sure, ‘Street Reaper’ is less a Vitus inspired record than I lead on, but it has all of that spirit when it gets down to business.

With all of the bogus, derivative and ultra-serious doom metal coming out of Europe this album is a throat-slashing reliever and a reset button on what was looking like a semi-boring career from this NW doom band. Fans of proto-metal, traditional doom metal, and the ilk who like retro heavy metal but don’t want just another predictable slacker dong toss will have fun with this. What might look like an amateurish joke band on paper reveals a truly adept set of songwriters with youthful, inspired metal energy juicing from every hole.

Muffin top out, got rubber to burn. 3.5/5.0