Beautifully weird doom metal from the UK, where doom metal is done best. My Dying Bride don't exactly match the weight of early Cathedral, or even the wretched sludge of Paradise Lost's 'Gothic', but the production here, particularly on the drum sound is rather weak, but this is one hell of a morose experience, but wonderfully stitched together like a patchwork quilt of gloom. Alot of the record is a nightmarish soundtrack to some grey, rain-battered castle through the trees, but when the band choose to doom rock ('The Forever People') they do it with the best of them, but it's on tracks such as 'The Bitterness & The Bereavement' that they excel at crafting surreal and gothic timewarps into dimensions unknown and caked in soil. Eight tracks of rusty, dramatic and often classically driven works, epitaph's to a great time in UK extreme metal and thankfully sporting that grim vocal delivery which bands such as Paradise Lost and Anathema gave up the ghost for. 'As The Flower Withers' is something akin to digging a grave on a rain-soaked night, wind howling through the woods, owls twit-twooing overhead, and the sodden pages of some long lost journal torn from the pages of a rotten corpse. You can smell the mould and the misery...
8/10
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