Evoken - Atra Mors

Released 31st July 2012/Profound Lore Records.

 This album has been out for nearly two months now and, after repeated listening, I am only just ready to write a review. Why? Because it’s the lengthy and desolate masterpiece that we’ve come to expect with every Evoken release, and they always take time to fully absorb.

Evoken have their sound fully established by this point in their career: bleak, horrendous-sounding epics that wallow in desolation but at the same time have a sense of grandeur: their songs create images of worlds beyond our perception, worlds of grotesque and sorrowful nothingness. Luckily, they haven’t shifted their style too much with ‘Atra Mors’ – it’s the classic Evoken sound, but this time it’s a little more refined, with the addition of a few added dimensions.

Some of these additions are: clean/spoken vocals on some tracks that add to the sombre atmosphere, cello interludes and even a melodic guitar-solo. All of these are integrated perfectly into the ebb and flow of the music; they aren’t simply hammered in for the sake of variety. The songs (and album as a whole) seem to demand the inclusions of these elements. The guitar solo at the end of ‘Descent into Chaotic Dream’ works perfectly: a melodic and achingly melancholic coda to the album’s top song – it starts off as a classic Evoken dirge, eventually interspersed with pieces of moderately speedy and ugly death metal, before ending quietly and melodically with the solo. It is the album’s highlight for sure, closely followed by ‘Grim Eloquence’. This is not to downplay any of the other tracks; the whole album is great and of course, like all Evoken albums, best listened to in its entirety. In light of this the cello-lead interlude tracks add to the overall journey feel of the album; plaintive and emotive stops for breath amongst the onslaught of the other tracks. They work perfectly.

Special mention must also go to the artwork and lyrics. The cover is my favourite Evoken cover ever: a black and white picture of hooded figures moving away from, what I believe is, a plague pit. Evoken have found the one image that perfectly personifies their sound; just look at it and you’ll understand where this band is coming from. Lyrically Evoken capture images of hopeless voids better than almost anyone:

“I will diminish those centuries and persecute those with quiet desperation...”

This comes from ‘Atra Mors’ (Black Death), and the lyrics are written from the perspective of the plague itself. A novel idea, and one captures the feeling of something that exists beyond man, something hideous and eternal that looms over every living thing, until eventually nothing lives at all. On the album’s final track ‘Into Aphotic Devastation’ we are given:

“A soundless realm, an unforgiving place where time seems endless.”

The imagery creates visions of a place of no life, light or hope; a nowhere realm far beyond our consciousnesses. This concept is key to grasping Evoken’s essence. There is something meaningful about staring into the void. In some ways you may even want to experience the void, and with Evoken’s music you can in some way.

The bottom line here is that if you liked anything Evoken have unleashed before then you will like this. Everything is here: the crunchy and low-tuned guitars mixed with plaintive clean playing, the low, guttural vocals, the perfectly paced and powerful drumming, the keyboard atmospheres, and overall the long and sorrowful walls of grief and pain. But everything is a bit better this time around. The five year gap between this and the last album has clearly refreshed the band. Each element of every song works perfectly, not a note is wasted. These are long songs that require their length, not songs that go on forever just to be epic. Essentially, ‘Atra Mors’ is a masterpiece. It is probably too early to tell, but give it a few years and I can see it overtaking ‘Antithesis of Light’ as their greatest work in most listener’s estimations. It seriously is that good.           

While Evoken are a funeral doom/death band (and no doubt one of the best to have ever existed) their total mastery of their sound and dynamics, their dedication to utter musical bleakness and their frankly brilliant compositional skills make them transcend genre, to take their place on a plateau of Neurosis-like greatness, where they create their own genre of ‘Evoken-metal’, something that exists on its own plane, going to places where others can only follow or look on in awe. 

9.5/10     

                        

Mourning Beloveth - Dust

Released 23rd January 2001/Bron

‘Dust’ has existed for over ten years now, and its continual melancholic presence in my CD player (iPod) and in my mind since that time has prompted this review. Additionally the promise of some new material from the band soon has made me consider just what was so good about their first album, and wonder whether they will ever match its melancholic power. Time will tell.

Press play and Mourning Beloveth’s supernaturally mammoth guitar sound simply drops on you, such is its huge presence. Metal is often described as crushing, but it is never truer said than here: the pure weight is something to experience. And that’s felt before the song (The Mountains Are Mine) has even really started; very soon the mixture of spoken vocals and sweeping melancholic singing begins while the listener is introduced to the band’s style on this album: heavy guitar riffs, melodic and miserable lead lines, tempos ranging from very slow through mid-paced to actually quite fast sometimes, guttural death vocals mixed with clean singing and an overall bleak and doomy atmosphere. Mountains are an apt image when trying to describe MB’s sound, because hugeness is the key: their songs stand as massive, desolate and unmovable as mountains.

Best example of MB at their bleak best comes in ‘Autumnal Fires.’ The vocal melodies here are spine-tingling, such is their melancholy majesty and the lyrics seem to relate the story of two lovers committing suicide, showing you where MB are coming from lyrically. My Dying Bride are the band that they often get compared to and they are certainly in that area, musically and lyrically. But their song writing and musical approach are strong enough to make ‘Dust’ stand next to anything MDB have released in terms of quality. But where some of MDB’s early albums suffered slightly from poor production ‘Dust’ sounds amazing; every nuance is heard in crystal clarity and every inch of power to be had from these songs is felt in no uncertain terms. Mourning Beloveth formed ten years before this album, their debut, was released, showing a band that have really had the time to perfect their songs and make them everything they can be. They are long, narrative pieces, expertly performed with multiple twists and turns that drag the listener down to realms of uncontrolled despair and righteous misery. Soundscapes for the troubled soul.

For those who like death/doom bands ‘Dust’ is an album they should not be without. It’s heavy, melancholic and emotional. Time stops in its presence. It is doom personified basically. I’m going to listen to it again now, and hope that the new album doesn’t take too long to arrive.

9.5/10 

Thergothon - Stream From The Heavens

Released 1994/Obscure Plasma

This is one of the albums often considered to have launched the funeral doom genre, and upon listening it’s easy to see why this monolith still stands tall and why its influence has been so far-reaching and enduring. As soon as opener ‘Everlasting’ begins you’re introduced to a character and peculiar intensity that is not heard from many other bands. There’s the slow, lurching guitar sound that seems to reach out to infinity with each somnambulistic chord; there’s the mournful chanted vocals mixed with low, drawn out death growls that sound like someone expiring; there’s the strange keyboard sounds creating a bizarre and warped atmosphere along with a sense of dismal melody; overall there’s a strange lulling feeling of being dragged down when listening to this album, of possibly being taken somewhere desolate, terrible and alien.

                                                                                                                    

Although they are considered funeral doom, it is important not to forget the influence of H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos upon Thergothon:

‘enormous buildings of slimy black stone

built by hands not similar to man.’

You can imagine no more appropriate soundtrack for the city of R’lyeh, the depths of sound matching the vastness of the structures and the creatures that dwell within. Indeed for all of the bands who are influenced by Lovecraft, and enjoy creating the soundtracks for his unique visions, Thergothon are the band who hit closest to the mark. The slow rumbling riffs bring Cthulhu to mind, stirring beneath the sea and sending up his subliminal lures to those susceptible. The desolate nature of the compositions create images of things lurking beyond where the eye can see, things overwhelming in their hugeness and grotesqueness, in landscapes untraveled by man.

This could all be incidental; these things occur to me when I listen to Stream From The Heavens but for others it may not be so. There’s a mountain of potential imagery and emotion to find in these songs. One thing is for certain though: this album cannot simply drift into the background when played. Some bands play songs that you enjoy, that you can headbang to before moving on to the next band. Not so with Thergothon: their songs take over your mindscape, becoming part of your mental architecture and altering it indefinitely. Again, key here is atmosphere; so atmospheric are the songs that the walls seem to drip with menace and melancholy, much like the towers of R’lyeh.

Potentially there are some problems with the album. Yes the production isn’t perfect, the guitar sound lacking the pure weight of funeral doom bands to come in their wake; yes the keyboard sounds could be considered dated; yes its unending slowness doesn’t make it an album for all places and times. But for me these things add to its unique character and power rather than detract from the overall quality. The sound and production are of its time and work very well to my ears, can’t complain about that too much. Personally I really like the keyboard sounds and atmospheres; they are unique and we’ll probably not hear anything quite like them on an album again (much like this album as a whole). And as for being an album that will probably only be listened to in certain places and times, and when the listener is in certain moods? Well, that’s funeral doom: one of the most extreme, melancholic, desolate and challenging metal genres there is, and if you’re at all interested in it you’ll know that it isn’t the kind of music to listen to when cruising in an open-top car near the beach or something.

So a perfect score for this album. Does any album really deserve a perfect score? It’s debateable, but in this case I can’t give any less, considering how much this album has meant to me over the years, and to the extreme metal scene as a whole. If you think of an album in terms of originality and influence, added to its quality as a piece of work in its own right then I think ‘Stream From The Heavens’ is pretty much perfect. It originated a sound (with a few other key bands), it influenced and inspired countless other bands and musically it is a masterpiece of depression, melancholy, atmosphere and just pure heaviness. In a way it is too bad that the band broke up before this album was even released, making it their only one, but in another way this is good. It stands now as a monolith, unending and undiminished, its desolate magic there for those who will listen, eternal and never to be repeated.

10/10 

Funeral/Extreme Doom

I want to review some slightly older, and more extreme stuff at the moment. Some of the bands that I'm listening to right now are:

Evoken
Skepticism
Tyranny
Ea
Ahab
Thergothon

So funeral doom is the order of the day. I also need to find time to write reviews for the new releases by Pilgrim and Pallbearer.

Swallow the Sun - Emerald Forest and the Blackbird

Released 1st February 2012/Spinefarm Records

Disappointment? A subject that doom metal bands may write about, but it shouldn’t be felt by the listener about the music itself. But that’s exactly what happened when I first listened to Swallow the Sun’s fifth album. More specifically I thought ‘what happened?’

Just to make it clear, I don’t think this album is a complete flop it’s just not as good as albums they’ve put out before. My main concern is that it’s just too damn soft in places. Take the second song on the album ‘This Cut Is The Deepest’ for example. Clean vocals only, acoustic guitars and a melodic, flowing, heavy-ish kind of atmosphere. It sounds a bit like where they were going with the ‘New Moon’ song from the last album, but where that song had a strong, catchy and emotional chorus this song just floats around never really going anywhere with no hooks to speak of. This is similar to the opening epic title track that is a bit of a formless mess; its quiet moments mixed with heaviness just don’t seem to hit home like this band’s prior songs. Opening with two duds is a serious problem for this album, and the cause of my initial concern on first listen.

Luckily the third track picks things up: Hate, Lead the Way is a vicious song, with black metal style vocals and a churning melodic structure mixed with heavy guitars – a classic STS track basically and the best song on the album. Interestingly the shorter songs seem to be the best on this album – maybe STS want to head in a Katatonia type direction and make their sound more accessible. A song like ‘Cathedral Walls’ with its additional vocals from the Nightwish singer could suggest this, but I don’t know how well STS would fare without their heavy doom moments, stripped down to rock song type structures and vocals. Not well, I think. The track ‘Labyrinth of London’ proves that STS can still write brilliant mini-epics, equal parts extreme and lushly melodic, showing that in writing this type of song is where their strengths really lie.

Additionally, the vocals of Mikko Kotamaki are brilliant, as usual. He has always been one of STS’s key assets due to his mastery of multiple styles and voices; he alternatively uses monstrous death vocals, raspy black ones and clean singing and in doing so adds a lot of unique characters to the songs. The guitars, bass and drums are all fine and well played, creating the cavernous heaviness, but it’s the keyboards that really push things forward, making the songs sound huge with STS’s trademark melodic doom sound.

It pains me to have to give a Swallow the Sun album a less than amazing score, because I am a huge fan, but ‘Emerald Forest and the Blackbird’ just isn’t up there with their best work. It has some good songs and some poor ones but overall it is their slightly softer and more ethereal sound that trips them up. That’s a matter of opinion of course, some will love it, but to someone new to the band I would say forget this album and look to their back catalogue for some much better stuff. I personally will hope for some greater work from this normally amazing band in the future.   

7/10

My Dying Bride - The Barghest O' Whitby

Released 7th November 2011/Peaceville Records

Maybe it’s because this is just an EP but My Dying Bride have really let rip here, letting the metal fury reach its hellish potential while fully existing in their individual plaintive and emotional style. Doomier and gloomier than they’ve sounded for a while, all facets of this great band’s unique style have been combined in to what, I believe, is their longest song ever, and it’s an absolute monster. There’s the sound of thunder to set the desolate atmosphere of the moors along with a wretched dog howl at certain points; the violins are present creating the melodic glory of MDB in their heyday; a dirty guitar tone grinds away in misery before speeding up for a few thrilling moments, giving the song peaks and valleys of tempo and mood. The guitar sound actually reminds me of MDB’s first two albums and the song as a whole makes me think that they really wanted to get back in touch with the death/doom roots here, which they do spectacularly.

Aaron Stainthorpe’s vocals are, of course, a highlight featuring some plaintive clean singing and his most wretched death vocals we’ve heard for some time. This highly iconic and individual vocalist seems to be getting better with age, judging by this, and he relates the story spectacularly over the most horrific, churning and brutal song My Dying Bride have put their name to for some time - if you’re a fan you need this song.

Realistically, this kind of things sells itself – you’re not going to promote a 27 minute gothic doom dirge to the majority of people, but if you are a fan this album is some kind of bleak heaven. I’m not going to say that it’s better or worse than any other MDB album because each release is a masterpiece in its own way, but The Barghest O’Whitby is another chapter in their ongoing story, and one that seems to reach a whole new tier of fevered misery that must be experienced to be believed.

9/10

Witchsorrow - God Curse Us

Released 28th May 2012/Rise Above Records.

Witchsorrow have given us a seriously solid piece of doom with ‘God Curse Us’: classic sounding but with enough uniqueness of style and some added aggression to make it stand out, this is my ideal modern doom album. ‘God Curse Us’ is heavy as hell, to put it simply. Maybe that’s a simple point to make but first things first; you want a doom band to be dredging-the-depths, crushing-your-head-in-with-a-hammer, planets-imploding heavy, and Witchsorrow deliver like the Grim Reaper himself. Never mind God cursing us, Witchsorrow are cursing God with this kind of heaviness. If bleakness is beauty then this album should be in a museum.

Of course, how much you like this album depends on how you feel about familiarity in this kind of music. There are multiple reference points to other bands in the tracks. For example the title song has the Sabbath-like feel of ‘Electric Funeral’ in its main riff. This is a doom staple and Witchsorrow use it because it sounds brilliant, not to break new ground, I think. Personally I don’t have any problem with a band in this genre not sounding completely original: doom needs the atmosphere, misery, plodding tempos and the basic sense of impending, crawling bleakness, and any massive movements away from the original backbone of the genre can reduce these elements, and this is a bad thing for doom-craving souls. There is a hierarchy of influences in the band’s overall sound which enhances the music and places them on their own pedestal in the doom pantheon: put simply, if you like Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus, Cathedral, Electric Wizard, Reverend Bizarre, The Gates of Slumber or countless others then you WILL love Witchsorrow. They wallow, and revel, in gloom and the endless doom that they (and we) love and it sounds amazing. Having such a firm grasp on and appreciation for the staples of the doom sound as they clearly do means Witchsorrow have created something like a how-to-do-doom-well manual; a perfect example of the genre.  

I had to mention the band’s relationship to music that has gone before because it’s unavoidable frankly, but let’s not get too bogged down with the idea. Witchsorrow are their own band; I feel pretty certain that I could hear a previously unheard song of theirs now and know it was them straight away. This is down to many factors, not least of which is the vocals. The excellently named Necroskull has a great, sneering voice that pumps out ominous doom sermons, with occasional forays in to a more extreme style. He also has a great sense of rhythm, making his vocals interlock perfectly with the riffs. Guitar tones are also extremely important for doom bands and Witchsorrow excel here. A really crunchy, but at the same time clear, guitar tone mixes with a thick, suffocating bass one, making a brilliant, no-frills doom sound come alive. Completing the power trio is the drummer who pounds ominously at funeral tempos, before blasting out mercilessly as the band enter one of their more fast-paced sections. The mix of tempos really give Witchsorrow an extra dimension to their sound, something which they take full advantage of.

Music can be analysed all night, breaking down and studying every aspect of it until it isn’t even fun anymore. But the simple things remain, and they are probably the reasons most people listen to music in the first place. The main elements of doom are atmosphere, emotion and heaviness and Witchsorrow deliver all of these to extremely capable and potent degrees. They studied the lore, enhanced it, covered it in the thickest misery going and made it their own. Listening to ‘God Curse Us’ is like taking a journey into the darkest essence of doom, and what more could you want really? Every aspect of it rules, from the playing to the production and the overall vibe and if you like doom metal at all you need to hear it.

8.5/10