Anathema – Alternative 4 (Peaceville Records – 1998)
Anathema’s Alternative 4 hits a sweet spot between the doom-laden metal of their early days and the uplifting self-help rock of their final ones. Frontman Vincent Cavanagh finds his voice amidst beautiful layers of instruments but the album also has an edgy, urban darkness. It’s like vicariously experiencing the emotions of someone’s most profoundly drunken bender: from rip-roaringly jubilant to extremely fighty to having a big cry. Alternative 4 is a very British masterpiece of maudlin, metropolitan metal: one of the most unique and intoxicating albums I’ve ever heard.
Tribulation’s third album The Children Of The Night was a breath of fresh air when it was released in 2015, injecting some much-needed excitement into a fairly dull year for metal. Every song on the album is absolutely killer but Winds was an immediate favourite of mine. Like the rest of the album, it’s a veritable “Best of Sweden” with the anthemic horror of Ghost, Dissection’s cold kvltness, In Solitude’s gothic darkness and Watain’s blackened, gurgly vocal attack. But the main thing I want to single out is the song’s chorus riff. It’s one of those brilliant “why wasn’t this written before?” moments. It’s an absolute show-stopper and the main reason that Winds instantly blew me away.
Congratulations to My Dying Bride as they celebrate 30 years of innovative, influential and thoroughly miserable metal. It’s an especially pleasing achievement given that the last five years have been particularly trying for the British band. When vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe’s young daughter was diagnosed with cancer in 2017, he was forced to take leave from the band. And when a further two band members decided to quit during this hiatus, the band’s future looked extremely doubtful.
Thankfully Aaron’s daughter was given the all clear and the band not only survives, but thrives. On their latest album The Ghost Of Orion they sound as vital, relevant and glum as ever. With its glacial pace, less obvious song structure and Andrew Craighan’s mournful riffs, The Long Black Land is definitely one of the album’s less instant and accessible tracks. But its also one of its most powerful: a black void right at the heart of the record. Like all the best doom, it’s laden with feeling and at the 6:25min mark, when a mellow breather bursts into a lumbering, seismic riff, it’s exquisitely powerful.
You wouldn’t know it from the music but, three decades in and at the top of their game, My Dying Bride and their fans have many reasons to be cheerful.
The punishingly bleak death metal on Paradise Lost’s 1990 debut Lost Paradise makes it the odd-one-out in a discography more renowned for gothic melody. But the five teenagers had only been together about a year before being faced with the challenge of recording their first record and, despite not having found their voice yet, they make a pretty decent fist of it. A lack of songcraft means it all kind of mushes together but they already have their doleful mix of riff and lead guitar down, there’s the occasional decent hook (“where is your God now?”), and the whole thing has a entrancingly subterranean atmosphere. And Lost Paradise has proven pretty influential in its own right as one of the earliest albums to slow death metal down to a miserable crawl. The Yorkshiremen would do much better with subsequent releases but fans of meat and potatoes death/doom could do a lot worse than check this out.
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