Review Summary: Dead to a Dying World are doing doom better than anyone else right now and it’s time you took notice.
When a doom band called Dead to a Dying World releases an album called
Elegy, you’d be forgiven for thinking “oh this old card again.” While the Dallas act drinks from many different and
very familiar wells, their brand of doom metal feels revelatory.
Flashes of Godspeed, Candlemass, Twilight, and The Pax Cecilia are everywhere on their latest record. But when the strings and shrieks swell on “Empty Hands, Hollow Hymns,” it doesn’t really matter because Dead to a Dying World pull their symphonic, sludge-laden take on their influences from a unique and emotive place.
Elegy takes cues from its own title and that of the band’s. It’s a dirge for the slow death of the planet which feels, thematically, like the fullest realization of the band yet. Fiction is full of apocalyptic visions of the fall of Earth, but
Elegy is a unique vestment of the morose and operatic sound of doom on a typically chaotic and melodramatic theme. Visions of the ravages of climate change and pollution elicit the depressing sounds of “Of Moss and Stone.” When one thinks about the depleted forests and disappearance of aquatic species, it’s “Hewn from Falling Water,” not Kreator’s “When The Sun Burns Red,” that plays.
It’s ostensibly depressing, lacking in subtlety and it works beautifully. Dead to a Dying World are doing doom better than anyone else right now and
Elegy is their boldest and most affecting statement yet.
