My Dying Bride – Songs of Darkness Words of Light – Review

My Dying Bride

Songs of Darkness Words of Light (Peaceville)
By Martin Popoff

My Dying Bride own this corner of the pigpen, so it’s perhaps their duty to keep the place maintained, a dead plant here, a bottle of tincture there, maybe a couple of crosses, some worn velvet curtains… Songs of Darkness Words of Light is almost surprisingly conservative for Aaron and his stooped Withnails, the band instantly getting down to business with dry, unyielding and compact heavy metal combinations played patiently and quintessentially slow, o’er which the man mumbles dream-like, throwing in the odd shirking Chris Barnes cowl. Rather than write anything new, the band work methodically to add to a billowing cloud shaped and sharped like barbed wire tumbleweed rolling over squishy English duskscapes. The album is simply more evidence of the band’s life of grime. Still, “The Blue Lotus” is a fetching metal track with a fresh vocal, and “My Wine in Silence” (see?) is a ballad that manages creepy ennui on the tarred and feathered wings of hypnotic, clean guitar strummery.
(4026 School House Lane Whitemarsh Township, PA 19462)