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Mourning Beloveth - Dust (Sentinel)

What a powerhouse of crushing, majestic misery rock.

Mourning Beloveth remind me a bit of what would happen if you took Mirror of Deception , November's Doom and Evoken, cremated them and then worked your black magick to reanimate this horrid amalgam. Dual vocals, crushing guitars and epic, sometimes haunting, sometimes downright suffocating song arrangements.
Dust is a re-release of said album, containing revised cover art, a brand new booklet and two bonus tracks. Nice.

The combination of the clean/death vocals favored by Mourning Beloveth is interesting. On the imposing opener "The Mountains are Mine" the lyrics kick off in spoken word, followed by clean singing and then the guttural grumble. Further into the song, the clean vox and death vox...erm... "harmonize" creating an especially haunting effect before a magnificent breakdown and some extremely regal guitar solo work. The clean vocals also are in full force (and thankfully so, vocalist Darren Moore has a helluva set o' pipes!) on the melancholic "Autumnal Fires".
Also especially worthy of mention are the title track which seems to compound all of the world's misery into 14 minutes and 36 seconds and the behemoth "Forever Lost Emeralds", a bonus track from MB's 1998 Autumnal Fires demo. Sure, MB sound a lot rawer here, like they wanted to out-slow and out-heavy the prehistoric sloth, but GAWDAMN does it rule! They should call this "teeth gnashing core". The death vocals on this one are especially evil.

Grant it, a criticism could be that there could have been more variety on here in terms of tempo changes and breakdowns, but the material as a whole, clocking in at a vast 74 minutes, is a doom lover's delight. Check it and get DOOMED!!