Mourning Beloveth 'A Disease for the Ages'

Irish Mourning Beloveth plays somewhat retrospective doom metal with mostly growling vocals, an unpolished but highly fitting sound, and an average song length exceeding 10 minutes. Needless to say, A Disease for the Ages is not full of surprises, but it is an album which is well worth getting acquainted with nevertheless.

Mourning Beloveth has penned five strong songs for this fourth album of theirs. One asset is the fact that an ultra slow tempo from start to end is avoided in favor of more dynamic song structures. The band does not rely on keyboards or gimmicks of any kind; instead, the songs are driven by repetitive, mournful guitar leads, and this stripped-down approach works really well in this case, especially on the opening track that sets high expectations [which are almost met] to the rest of the album. While there are no objections to be made against the song writing, the monotonous growls get tiresome rather quickly. The occasional clean vocals partly remedy this problem, but in the end it does prevent A Disease for the Ages from entering the top quarter of the grade scale. Still, the album is definitely recommendable, not only to fans of doom/death metal, but also to people into traditional doom metal [provided they can tolerate the growling vocals].

Bloodchamber.de