Wino’s Forever Gone album: a doom legend unplugged

Robert Scott Weinrich, aka Wino, remains one of doom’s foremost pioneers and with bands like Saint Vitus, The Obsessed and Shrinebuilder, he has released an expansive body of work defined by raw, uncompromising heaviness. Wholly oblivious to commercial viability, Wino’s vision has historically stood in surly defiance to prevailing trends both in and outside of heavy metal, conferring upon his music a broad artistic credibility. On his third solo album – the inaugural release in Ripple Music’s ‘Blood And Strings’ acoustic series – Wino revisits the acoustic approach of 2010’s Adrift. Forever Gone hews largely to the stripped-down balladry of tracks like Dead Yesterday and Taken, though it closers with a swaggering blues rock cover of Joy Division’s Isolation. Musically these tracks fall into a very generic strain of bare-bones Americana but its highly compelling lyrics and spectral sense of intimacy certainly merit a listen.