The grimmest doom I’ve heard yet this year has come from Ramesses. The UK trio boasting ex-members of Electric Wizard have tapped the mainline of cult horror and turned it into Take the Curse (review here), a startlingly heavy crusher of an album that feels pulled straight from the nightmares of Yvonne Monlaur. Even in its quiet moments, it is furious and foreboding in equal measure.

Ramesses is comprised of bassist/vocalist Adam Richardson, guitarist Tim Bagshaw and drummer Mark Greening. Take the Curse is their second album (first through their management’s label, Ritual Productions), and the band has previously done splits with the likes of Negative Reaction and Unearthly Trance. Their last full-length, 2007’s Misanthropic Alchemy, was also a monster, and it’s no surprise they call themselves The Ram Family — which I imagine is like The Manson Family, except instead of peace, love and murder, it’s Hammer horror, the occult and weed — when you take into account how much this music feels like it’s brainwashing you to obey it.

Since Ramesses recently played the album release show for Take the Curse at Rough Trade East in London, that seemed an appropriate-as-any place to start my email exchange with Adam Richardson, who was kind enough to enlighten me on how Take the Curse came together, how the band captured such aural sickness, their tour plans, relationship with Electric Wizard and more.

You’ll find the Q&A after the jump. Please enjoy.

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Quit your day job and sacrifice a lemur, Ramesses have a new album! And a brutal, disgusting slab of doomed madness it is. Titled Take the Curse and released through the band’s own Ritual Productions, the second Ramesses full-length follows 2007’s Misanthropic Alchemy, splits with Unearthly Trance (2009) and Negative Reaction (2004), and two EPs, 2005’s We Will Lead You to Glorious Times and 2009’s Baptism of the Walking Dead, all three tracks from which appear here as well. The Dorset band play the kind of doom your mother warned you about, the kind of doom that you lose friends over, the kind of doom where your woman leaves you because you refuse to trim your beard.

The kind of doom where one backpatch just doesn’t seem to cut it.

You get the point.

Originally an offshoot of Electric Wizard, from which guitarist Tim Bagshaw and drummer Mark Greening split following the 2002 Let us Prey album, Ramesses definitely have elements of droning riffery in common with Jus Oborn’s influential outfit, but theirs is a dirtier, grittier, nastier sound. The death metal growling of bassist/vocalist Adam Richardson (who was also in Electric Wizard predecessor Thy Grief Eternal with Oborn), layered with cleaner sub-melodic shouting, gives Ramesses songs a different atmosphere entirely. A sense of ritual is maintained, but it’s more like the ceremony is taking place out back behind the pub than on some altar out of an early-‘70s horror flick. “Black Hash Mass” backs me up on this, with Greening working in blastbeats amid Satanic sampling and horrific wails from Richardson.

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