>>99251
>>99254
Until the mid-2000s, Doom Metal was perhaps the least noticed of Heavy Metal's subgenres in spite of two decades worth of mindblowing albums. An unfortunate consequence of this collective intrigue in forgotten Metal records from decades ago came this overzealous labeling of heavier psychedelic bands as Doom Metal. This includes the ever so prevalent fallacy of "70s Doom" propagated by insolent music journalists and clever record distros who saw the perfect opportunity to move product.
Simply put: no active, touring and/or recording Doom bands existed in the '70s. Despite Black Sabbath's influence on Metal and especially Doom Metal, the band never was a full-fledged Doom band. One could even argue they weren't a Metal band until "Master of Reality", but that's another topic altogether. Pentagram's early material tinkered with Hard Rock, Psychedelic Rock and Heavy Metal, and Bedemon's demos never reached a wider audience until they were bootlegged in the '80s.
Doom Metal proper started in the '80s, a decade that bequeathed Tyrant (who later became Saint Vitus), Trouble, Death Row/Pentagram, Candlemass, Cirith Ungol, Witchfinder General and Pagan Altar. These bands can be safely considered the origin of Doom Metal. The few obscure "Doom" bands (besides those affiliated with Candlemass and Iron Man) people name drop from the '70s lack so many of the qualities seen in the bigger bands.
So what is Doom Metal, you ask? This is perhaps the best explanation for the genre I've heard:
>Imagine Black Sabbath's career were moving chronologically backwards. Let's start in the 70s here so we don't have to go through their entire back catalogue. Imagine "Vol. 4" was Black Sabbath's first album. Then "Master of Reality" is their second, "Paranoid" their third, and then the self-titled album is their fourth. Now imagine that the band Earth never existed, and instead of following up their now fourth album with whatever blues type of music Earth played you take the backwards development of the Black Sabbath style and spin it further into the unknown. Muddier, more inchoate, more protozoic and somewhat creepier with each passing album. Then, when you followed that backwards movement all the way to the eighth album (being some time in 1962 or so), you've arrived at Saint Vitus. All their influences reverse engineered to a form that would have existed in the early 1960s if heavy metal and doom metal had not evolved from rock music but came into being at zero metalness (but nothing else either) in 1950 and slowly but steadily grew more and more in metal content (without rock music or blues or any other form of music ever having any influence).