My name is Ross and im 26, I like travelling, reading, music (mainly metal),going to gigs, photograp...
My name is Ross and im 26, I like travelling, reading, music (mainly metal),going to gigs, photography, painting, hiking, and cinema.
Cheers to everyone who has read my reviews! Comments are always welcome.
Member since:12.06.2009
Reviews:179
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"Then Heaven opened above me And down Gods tears came Lashing away at my skin My stinking, rotten frame"
My Dying Bride have always been evolving as a band, but one thing which has remained constant is the sheer quality of their releases. Their ninth full length,A Line of Deathless Kings, is no exception. It's a very mellow album by their standards, with Aaron Stainthorpe employing clean sung vocals for almost its entire duration. Likewise, the songs maintain a slow and steady pace throughout, being for the most part unhurried and reflective. Woeful, heavy riffs give way to achingly beautiful harmonised twin guitar riffs that stretch to the heavens, whilst Aaron's dejected crooning hovers above.
The first track, 'To Remain Tombless' , shifts from fast, choppy riffage and black metal-esque arpeggios to wide-open sections with mournful drawn-out vocals, whilst 'L'amor Detruit is a more sombre beast, with an anguished guitar melody and a leaden, lumbering riff giving way to delicate strings and crashing waves of sound before falling back upon itself.
'And I Walk With Them' is the standout track however, with distorted guitars ploughing lamentably along as Aaron pleads pathetically to God for mercy, before a languishing melody plunges the song downwards into despairing depths before building upwards again to the hammering of a double bass pedal, then downwards once again with crushing, chugging doom riffs and anguished melodies marked by a single tormented howl. It even has church organ synths in there.
'Loves Intolerable Pain' begins with typical "Light at the End of the World" era riffs before flowering into celtic, folkish melodies complete with soaring vocals, evoking an earthy, windswept and ancient place in the fashion of Primordial. It may be just me, but this excursion into pastoral folk territory always makes me think of Iron Maiden's 2000 album 'Brave New World'.
Though it was released as a single, I always found 'Deeper Down' a somewhat lacklustre track, which seems to meander along without the usual sense of purpose that MDB songs have. In spite of this it is still perfectly good, but perhaps the weakest song the album in terms of structure.
The final track, 'The Blood, The Wine, The Roses', is another slab of finest doom, built around a fantastic, and decidedly Maidenesque air-guitaring-in-the-living-room riff, mixed in amongst the gloom, before descending into a final acerbic spurt of death metal rage, complete with growls and cursing, to close the album. This is a trick we've seen before, on 'The Dreadful Hours' (2001), but it's great to see MDB can still be brutal when they want to and it left me with a huge grin on my face.
Although 'A Line of Deathless Kings' was supposedly written and recorded very quickly, the song structure is nevertheless excellent and superbly executed. Whilst very much in the vein of previous efforts for the most part, the new, mellower elements work extremely well and the album certainly has an identity of its own. Its nothing groundbreaking, its simply another beautiful, solid MDB album. Highly recommended.
Summary: Mature, atmospheric superbly executed British doom.
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