I’ve long held the view that, of the three doom bands to have emerged from the Peaceville stables in the early nineties, My Dying Bride have remained the most consistent. Whilst there has been experimentation (for example with the much maligned and woefully underrated ’34.788% complete’), the band have remained true to the dark, complex doom with which they made they name, their albums each proving to be potent landmarks in an ever-changing musical landscape, each one conjuring a unique air of dread and abject horror. Whilst the band have honed and refined their skills over the last two and a half decades, their secret weapon remains the mournful, Shakespearean delivery of Aaron Stainthorpe who delivers his dark monologues with the weary grace of Macbeth as the band trace desolate landscapes around him. It is an oppressive sound that My Dying Bride create and on ‘feel the misery’, the band’s twelfth grimly poetic opus, the band are at their weightiest, tearing the very light from the sky over the course of eight epic tracks.
Opening with the near-ten-minute paean to woe ‘and my father left forever’, My Dying Bride stun the listener by tearing into the song with unaccustomed vigour, whilst Aaron’s clean, timorous vocal is a world away from the deathly rasp of the band’s early years. It’s an unexpectedly vital opening track, although as the violin pierces the guitar-strewn murk, a chillier atmosphere starts to build and the music takes a more sinister turn. It’s a hell of an opening gambit and it provides the perfect contrast to the brutal, slowed-down death metal of ‘to shiver in empty halls’ which sees Aaron stripping his larynx to the core over a sludgy morass of harsh riffing that still retains a dark, velvety gothic edge thanks to the judicious use of keyboards and occasional stabs of elegant lead work. The band continue to impress with the eloquent descent into misery that is ‘a cold new curse’ and as the guitars slowly wind their way into your soul, it’s hard not to credit returning guitarist Calvin Robertshaw with injecting new life into the band. Even by My Dying Bride’s high standards this is a stand-out album and a far better spiritual successor to ‘for lies I sire’ than the raw ‘a map of all our failures’, as ‘feel the misery’ far better captures the juxtaposition of ancient majesty and deathly brutality that has always marked out My Dying Bride as unique travellers within the realms of extreme metal. A shorter track, the title track has a dark folk feel underpinning its atmospheric opening before a potent riff tears the heart from the song and renders it, dripping and still beating, for all to see. It’s a clear sign that My Dying Bride have not only maintained the lyrical intensity that makes them so unique, but that they have refined their core sound to such a point that for any newcomer to attempt to emulate it would be an exercise in futility – My Dying Bride are at the forefront of their art and ‘feel the misery’ is a remarkably concise effort.
Another relatively short track, ‘a thorn of wisdom’ opens with ominous keyboards, weaving a beautiful cloak of night around the listener as the band channel both Joy Division and Black Sabbath in an enervating exercise in misery that never quite explodes in the manner that might be expected. Always a band capable of emphasizing the dark sensuality that lies at the heart of gothic literature and music, My Dying Bride excel on the majestic ‘I celebrate your skin’, which is hauntingly lascivious whilst another elegant piece, ‘I almost loved you’, opens slowly and builds into a wonderfully atmospheric piece that eschews metal and has more in common with the band’s classical ‘evinta’ than any other work the band have previously worked upon. It’s a short, beautifully melancholy piece of music that leads the listener, blank-eyed and filled with grief, to the stately closer of ‘within a sleeping forest’ which draws together all of those elements which make My Dying Bride such a formidable proposition (grandiloquent riffs, soaring violin, deathly vocals) and allows the curtain to fall upon this latest album with a dark grace that makes you desperate to immerse yourself once more in the dark night-time world the band inhabit.
Whilst I am content to assert that My Dying Bride have never released a bad album, there are still albums in the band’s back catalogue that stand tall. Different fans will have different favourites, although to my mind the high points would be ‘the angel and the dark river’, ‘34.788% complete’, ‘a line of deathless kings’ and ‘for lies I sire’. To these dark masterpieces I would now add ‘feel the misery’, an album that showcases the very best that My Dying Bride have to offer, with the band weaving an atmosphere that is palpable over the course of the album’s eight tracks. There is darkness and light, the stench of death and the sanguine eroticism of the vampire all woven into the sinister tapestry of the music and, at the heart of it all, the bleak pronouncements of Aaron Stainthorpe, whose performance is, once again, a thing of ancient beauty. My Dying Bride remain one of the finest doom bands on the planet, and albums like ‘feel the misery’ only enhance an already unblemished reputation. Long may these dark kings reign.
