Following the almost universal praise dropped on their self-titled debut from Meteor City, Cleveland, Ohio's Abdullah maintain unmistakable traces of doom on their second full-length, Graveyard Poetry, while advancing to embrace a melodic battery flashed with a variety of influences, from The Doors to Motorhead, the inevitable Black Sabbath, and even Motley Crue.

Graveyard's more classically metal sound reflects tastes the other moving force in Abdullah, guitarist Alan Seibert, originally brought to the band; yet despite the fact that founder and vocalist Jeff Shirilla came from underground, sludgecore roots, his unabashed affection for the Crue's first two albums, in addition to the old Priest and Maiden, remains intact.

Shirilla, who also writes the band's heady lyrics, sounds uncannily like Acid Bath's Dax Riggs at times, a fact not lost on him -- in fact, it was Riggs' example that allowed Shirilla to find a style all his own: "Dax changed how I felt about vocals. He was comfortable with what he had. He made me realize that I didn't have to have this huge range, like Chris Cornell or Axl Rose."

Graveyard Poetry's title "comes from the Victorians -- what was involved with the whole burial process, the epitaphs on tombstones and such." The bird iconography gracing the cover signals Shirilla's "preoccupation" with the winged creatures: "Mostly the raven, 'cause it's a 'death bird,' I guess." (Refreshingly unpretentious, Shirilla comes across as subtly self-mocking; there's a kind of smile to his voice.) "Thematically, I want to tie it all together. On the paneling [graphics inside the album] there's a lot of faces -- sort of like ghostly images."

Unusually clean for the doom hyphen genre, Abdullah still downtunes the guitars. "We use alternate tunings, actually," Shirilla explains. "With Graveyard Poetry, we call it 'drop B,' 'cause we go from C sharp and we drop the last strings, so it's kind of like open tuning. I think there's four or five songs that have that lower tuning, like the first song, 'Black Helicopers', and a couple other ones. But we don't have any set rules."

Shirilla's background in English literature -- he holds a BA in the subject -- becomes obvious with a glance at some of Abdullah's song titles: 'The Whimper Of Whipped Dogs' (taken from a Harlan Ellison story); 'Proverbs Of Hell' (William Blake) and 'Behold A Pale Horse' (St. John the Divine). "My focal area was the Elizabethan genre, but I studied a lot of the Romantic and Victorian era, which obviously comes out in the song titles, or corruptions thereof. William Blake and John Milton were huge influences."

The mystical overtones that permeate Abdullah's songs may give rise to the impression that Shirilla's staunchly religious, a gloss he denies: "I don't believe in organized, but I do have a spiritual side, and that shines through. Yet I wanted to make it [the lyrics] purposefully ambiguous, so people could interpret what they want to."

As for the band's name, the post 9/11 paranoia surrounding all things Middle Eastern forces Shirilla to come clean: "We were going to keep it secret, but now people give us strange looks; soâ?¦we got the name from a professional wrestler in the 70s called Abdullah the Butcher. He was like a 400-pound monster. The first time we ever got together, we rented these old wrestling videos. It's kind of silly, 'cause the band when it started off was totally different from what it's turned into now -- sort of like a sludgy, noisy type of band like Merzbow or Boris. Something like that, I guess you can equate it more to a 400-pound pro wrestler! We tried to be experimental, not just noise for noise's sake. But that was just kind of the starting point."

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