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| 0.0 | EPurpl3 | December 3rd 08 |
The name of the band (we who were once alive) suits the nature of the debut perfectly, as images of ghosts standing between your speakers in your darkened room hold out their arms and beckon to you. For once, an introduction actually fits the album in that it sets the scene and the context of what is to follow, and that scene is distinctly medieval and war like. Im instantly reminded of The Soil Bleeds Black and their The Kingdom and its Fey with its horses being saddled and armoured and the sound of blacksmiths making ready with their forges and hammers. The Dead Can Dance prayer-like lament and Saltarello-ism energy reinforces this image of battle busiment and for me at least, I picture the battlefields of France in Henry V, or the forests of Saxony in Gladiator. The keyboards are perfectly understated and used bathe the guitars in grey and silver. The guitars cut like razor blades with an almost home-made, home-recorded ferocity, all the time the timpani beat out the march.
The most obvious points of reference is Tyranny, but there are elements of all the members day-job bands in there somewhere. The voice reminds me very much of My Shameful with its tar-like oozing blackness. There are funeral bells and cockle shells and pretty corpses rotting in a row. Is there a theme of lament for the dead? Perhaps those that died violently on a battlefield long ago have come to touch us in our dreams? This is the sort of album to listen to and absorb for many years to come. If you are familiar with albums like Skepticisms Lead and Ethere, Pantheists O-Solitude, My Shamefuls Dust, Tyrannys Bleak Vistae, Solicide De Untergang des Abendlanders, and Dead Can Dances The Serpent's Egg, and you can imaging merging elements of all these into something that this album uses, but does not rely upon, then youll have some idea what it sounds like. Its also important to point out that this work sounds whole, not cobble together or cut and pasted or compiled a bit here and a bit there like some sort of collage. It flows, and equally important, it changes. In fact its a bit of an emotional roller coaster of desperate lows to almost hate and bitterness, covering several bases of the funeral ordeal.
Only time will judge if this is another Tyrannys Bleak Vistae or Skepticisms Lead and Ethere, Ive only listened to his album half a dozen times, but already I feel confident in giving it a mark almost in line with these master works. Outstanding and deep and the best album of 2007 so far.
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