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Mourning Beloveth 'The Sullen Sulcus'

The above words, taken from a song on Anathema's Crestfallen EP, have, for this writer, served as a delightfully succinct encapsulation of the best that the doom metal genre has to offer. Over a hopelessly bleak, mercilessly repeating riff, Darren White's almost unparalleled guttural, dejected voice growls those lyrics, conveying a sense of lovelorn tragedy with a desparate, stabbing authenticity. And therein lies doom metal's elegance; reflecting the perverse beauty found in profound loss, it renders itself beyond the reach of those malign forces, abundant elsewhere in metal, whose grasping claws are ever sharpened and ready to cleanse and trim any promising sound until it's rendered acceptable to the unsophisticated palate and we all forget what it was we liked about it in the first place. Doom metal seems alone among Mother Metal's countless children in being immune to the lure of The Man; its adherents seem to almost unanimously truly comprehend what it offers, and the genre can't be cynically manipulated because anyone tampering with the formula in such a way as to strip it of its honesty and genuine emotion leaves nothing of worth behind. So whilst it can span the widest variety of soundscapes of any metal subgenre, from pill-poppin', garagey, blues-scale psychedelia to NWOBHM singles played on 33 through unearthly, shamanic eyes-rolled-right-back-into-the-head horror to suffocating minimalistic hypnosis, doom has an earnestness at its core which unites all its strands and allows it to be, as a genre, probably the most sophisticated form of expression within metal's canon.

All of which pontificating is of course nothing more than a slightly contrived excuse to tack on more whinging onto a casual survey of a few notable doom releases from the last few months. We begin our doom prospectus with the new (or not so new now, as it's been kicking around my house for ages) Mourning Beloveth album, The Sullen Sulcus (Aftermath). I just love the cover art, which is remarkably similar to a mental image that goes through my mind whenever I'm listening to the more crushing style of doom; it depicts a male figure floating in an unidentifiable crimson aether, torso bent backwards in total submission and arms thrown wide to welcome whatever incomprehensible power it is he's given himself up to. But wait, what's this? Amid the detail, we can discern that this enigmatic figure's last act was to pull off the top of his head, perhaps in some kind of bizarrely extreme trepanning experiment to let the vermilion doomhaze soak his mind completely, and there's his brain popping out, look. I'm at a loss to explain the female figure with a cloud of ink-blot hair who's very helpfully catching the brain, however.

Although it's pleasing for me to note that Mourning Beloveth's minds are in tune with mine to some extent with regard to the way they interpret the sounds and textures of doom metal, the actual album only manages to be excellent, and not a world-shattering spine-stripper. (Which of course is the sort of criticism only the most unreasonable of people could come up with.) At first it seemed that these fine Irish gentlemen were taking their love of early My Dying Bride too far and they had finally succumbed to the sucking quicksand of their influences and lost much of their individuality, but repeated listening reveals that to be a very uncharitable and lazy judgement; Mourning Beloveth's character hasn't been lessened - it's just changed, and quite subtly at that. Yes, of course there's tons of Bride floating around, with all the dark harmonies, mournful spoken passages, overwhelming Academy production and busy, detailed and unhurried songwriting that suggests, but there's a dreamy, ethereal feel which complements the cover image well and allows the band to project their own, coherent identity onto a canvas designed by genre grandmasters. The Sullen Sulcus is powerful and faithful to a familiar sound without being pointlessly generic, and as such well worthy of attention.