From their very inception as a splinter group founded by a severely disgruntled two-thirds of renowned British doom trio Electric Wizard, Ramesses never lacked for motivation to succeed -- they just lacked the songs. In fact, the best compliment one could pay to Ramesses' first releases was that their slurry brand of sludge/doom/crust metal sounded somewhat "intriguing," but it was still abundantly clear to most observers that guitarist Tim Bagshaw and drummer Mark Greening's planned "dish best served cold" wasn't ready to leave the kitchen just yet. So Bagshaw and Greening knuckled down with their Ramesses accomplice, bassist/vocalist Adam Richardson, and kept working on their craft for the next few years, finally re-emerging in 2010 with a much-improved second album named Take the Curse. Here, the trio took great strides to hone its songwriting while simultaneously broadening its dynamic reach -- all without significantly altering its fundamental extreme sonic blueprint beyond recognition (i.e., selling out). Bagshaw's guitars still rumble along on waves of amp distortion, Greening's drums still thunder with Bonham-esque reverberations, and Richardson's throaty growls and wretched screams still haunt the premises, but surprisingly memorable cuts like "Iron Crow," the hypnotic "Baptism of the Walking Dead," and the terminally brooding "Another Skeleton" also feature well-defined riffs, evocative spoken passages, and even insidiously nestled melodies that burrow into the subconscious like never before. Most songs are still rooted in sluggish doom tempos, and the album does wind down with a clunker or two ("The Weakening," "Khali Mist"), but, for the most part, the material clearly thrives on a newfound sense of energy (or urgency) -- and that's got nothing to do with the shocking black metal flurries contained in "Black Hash Mass" and "Hand of Glory." In short: this was the sort of revenge that Bagshaw and Greening sought to inflict in the first place, and seeing as the Electric Wizard Panzer tank has been anything but invincible in the interim, Take the Curse is the sort of musical statement that Ramesses can truly be proud of. [As a bonus, CD versions of Take the Curse contained not one but two alternate booklets, each graced with images of the hellish sculpture concocted by artists Jake and Dinos Chapman and known as F**king Hell.]