By Gruesome Greg
Album number four from this female-fronted doom troop can be pretty much divided into two categories: the 10-minute epics and the two-minute interludes, of which there are three of each, along with one song that’s only six minutes long.
We get started with “Gnosis,” which happens to be the longest selection, spanning 13-and-a-half minutes. Being that there’s no interlude to open the album, this one starts off sparsely and takes a little while to build up, eventually adopting a sombre, funereal, death-doom pace. There are also some shades of fellow British doom acts Solstice and Warning. In essence, this record isn’t gonna take you to a happy place.
“Lost Bride” is a six-minute slice of slightly more up-tempo doom drudgery with somewhat grating female vocals pulsating and oscillating above the mix. That aside, there are some pretty decent doomy downstrokes on this one. The title track, at nine minutes and change, fades in slowly and crawls along at an equally slow pace, somewhat akin to Demon Lung—albeit minus the pinch harmonics (which are a good thing to exclude, unless you’re Zakk Wylde). This one even features French whispers and a touch of acoustic guitar…
Interludes aside, the album concludes with “The Silence,” a 12-and-a-half-minute epic that brings back the true-doom riffage along with the soaring female vocals and similar slow pacing. Not much variety to be found here—I can take it or leave it.
(Candlelight)
