Listening to Jex Thoth, it's almost possible to imagine that you're back into the mid 70s, in an era where the classic metal bands like Black Sabbath and Pentagram were at the heights of their artistic and popular success. Make no mistake, there is a pretty professional production behind the music of Jex Thoth, and it's undoubtedly a product of the digital era, but if you close your eyes you can almost for a minute imagine that this was done the old-fashioned way, without the aid of a sophisticated recording setup or post-studio retooling.

Jex Thoth is of course the new name of Totem, who released a decent and reasonably well-regarded EP a few moons back, and despite the new name they more or less bring the same goods to the table; a slow doom metal sound distinguished by female vocals, occasional hints of psychedelia (mainly through the organ that's employed to good effect on a couple of tracks), and a hell of a lot of druggy, fuzzy guitar sludge in the place of proper riffs or melodies.

The organ is an important piece, because its when the band decide to incorporate it and other psychedelic influences into their sound that they're the best. The Banishment is a good example, because it starts out nice and slow with the melody being provided almost exclusively by the organ, until it jumps into a brighter, more lively second section that sounds like something Jim Morrison might have put together if he had ever collaborated with Ozzy.

However, when the band put these interesting pieces of their sound away and stick to a more orthodox doom metal template, they start to become a little dull. In particular, the Equinox Suite, which runs over fifteen minutes of the album's second half is a good idea in theory, but the execution is just a little flat, which leaves it sounding like second rate prog-metal. Also, the guitar/bass combination waste a lot of time creating really muddy sounding drone when, as they proves on Obsidian Night, they can crank out some decent riffs and chops when they want to. The lyrics of Jessica Toth, while distinctive, are also brought way too far forward into the mix, to the point where she accidentally overpowers a lot of the music here with some lyrics that are, honestly, pretty awful.

That said, if you're itching for a fix of good old-fashioned doom metal or stoner metal that just happens to feature clean female vocals, you could do a lot worse than Jex Thoth. The problems on this album are nothing that the band won't be able to work out on future releases, so long as they keep the good ideas on this album and discard the bad ones.