My Dying Bride - "A Mortal Binding"
Slow, yet dangerous Death-Doom
With the 30th anniversary of their debut album happening last year, My Dying Bride have been mainstays in the English Doom scene for a long while now. A Mortal Binding is their 14th full-length album, and the amount of practice and experience the band has racked up shows on every moment of the album.
It’s a slow, agonizing listen; Doom Metal tends to languish on these low-tuned chords, moving methodically from one long, legato note to the next. The effect is an auditory replication of the inexorable movement of time.
The march of the Reaper.
The genre was already well-established by the time My Dying Bride arrived on the scene, but the band was part of the push which expanded the Death-Doom subgenre, starting with their 1992 debut album, As the Flower Withers.
If you want to sample the distinction between Doom and Death-Doom, you need go no further than the first two tracks on A Mortal Binding, as opener “Her Dominion” is an unstoppable grinding of that inexorable Doom core with harsh Death overtones. It isn’t just the harsh vocals — there’s a subtle sourness in the droning instrumentation. And this sourness recurs in, for example, “The 2nd of Three Bells”, after the harsh vocals reappear for a moment.
Track two, “Thornwyck Hymn”, by contrast, is a very straightforward Doom track — and a very good one. I should note, though, that the drumming on the album — on every track — leans more Death than Doom. It rarely goes seriously hard, and when it does, it doesn’t it for long; but there’s a bit more aggressive technicality in the percussion than I normally look for in Doom.
Other critics have also noted Gothic Metal among the band’s genric labels, but I’m not really convinced. I mean, there’s the brief choir on “Unthroned Creed” and the violin on “The Apocalyptist”, for example, but the tonal tendencies of Doom and Gothic are very similar. It is probable that other critics are hearing something I’m not, so I figured it best to just mention it.
In proper Doom fashion, the album is filled with long songs; there are only 7 tracks, but it lasts for almost 55 minutes.1 All of them eventually get where they’re going, evolving and shifting as they progress.
This is good Doom, through and through. There’s nothing mind-blowing on this album, but there’s also nothing awful. It’s competently assembled and expertly executed. It’s just missing a spark of something.
Rating: Green
That averages out to 7.8 minutes for each song.