MY DYING BRIDE – A Mortal Binding

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7.5

• Bands:
  MY DYING BRIDE
• Duration: 00:54:42
• Available from: 04/19/2024
• Label:

• Nuclear Blast

Streaming not yet available

It seems incredible that nine years have already passed since the release of “Feel The Misery”, just as it seems absurd and impossible that there are four that separate us from the release of the latest full-length album “The Ghost Of Orion”. But anyway, time flies, passes and never comes back and the albionic My Dying Bride come to offer us their fourteenth collection of long-distance songs, this time entitled “A Mortal Binding”, still out on the giant Nuclear Blast.
Released close to the disastrous lockdown of the spring of 2020, an entirely Italian precursor to the Covid-19 pandemic, the previous work of the Dying Bride was able to divide the fans’ opinions on its actual success quite equally, among those who considered it too melodic and prostrate to the will of the new record label, and those who instead judged it to be a very valid album of classic doom-gothic metal. Years after then, we feel like reducing our 7.5 assigned to time a tad: if on the one hand the individual releases have remained memorable over time, on the other the entirety of the platter today leaves something to be desired, son spurious of a unique moment in our career, composed solo by guitarist Andrew Craighan during the illness of vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe’s daughter, a very dark period in the band’s history. And shortly followed, in fact, by the more valid and original – always if evaluated with hindsight – “Macabre Cabaret”, an EP of excellent workmanship designed to present the new second guitar Neil Blanchett and get rid of the depressive pandemic dust.
Having summarized the background to the new album in these lines, we therefore arrive at the presentation of “A Mortal Binding”, an album in which My Dying Bride find a more choral composition and which they arrive at after years spent in the now traditional ‘under the radar’ approach, sipping live performances and keeping a low media profile. Stylistically, despite the fact that every time we tirelessly expect some brilliant twist from a band that has never disdained experimenting, while remaining in its genre humus (let’s exclude from the calculation the now ancient “34,788%…Complete”, obviously) , the album sets its seven pearls within the doom-gothic metal typical of the group, returning to being, however, a more linear and coherent compendium of songs (also predictable?) compared to “The Ghost Of Orion”, which proposed a decidedly fluctuating tracklist. Here, however, we find the aforementioned seven tracks as such: seven regular, standard compositions, no interludes, no instrumentals, no intros or outros… In short, an orderly sequence of songs à la My Dying Bride placed on a velvety and morbid substratum decadent.
Another characteristic that immediately reaches the ears, from the first listens, is precisely the songwriting put on the plate this time, which has returned to being enveloping, collective, with all the instruments better integrated with each other, almost as if to prepare a greater yield and live impact of the singles episodes: Lena Abè’s bass is very present and deeply resonant in the sound aisles of the Brideian sound, the ghostly tolling of a cathedral; the added depth and groove of Blanchett’s guitar, combined with the usual classy brushstrokes and rough lashes of the mastermind Craighan, who once again brings a deadly martiality to marriage with the typical bittersweet melody coming from her strings; the rhythmic patterns of the solid Dan Mullins behind the drums; and finally the scores of Shaun MacGowan, who with his keyboards and his violin has always had the arduous task of not making us miss the iconic passages of the champion of the golden age Martin Powell, a task which he carries out in “A Mortal Binding” with the necessary care and sufficient inspiration, without ever reaching the unmentionable heights of its more famous predecessor. And then we have Aaron, who, unlike the performance – much discussed but good for us – on “The Ghost Of Orion”, leaves aside those very melodic and hyper-incisive vocal lines to return to less sweet registers, less catchy, dosing his being Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde with chemical wisdom and delving into his suffering past as a painful and theatrically languid interpreter.
The production follows hand in hand, therefore, this slight return to a harder sound, in which the guitars take back control of the situation and become sinister and martial, fat and ‘thick’, launching, as written above, into lean and minimal on at least a couple of occasions, to bring back into vogue that latent death metal rot but still present in the stylistic backroom of the Dying Bride. To look at it in a nutshell, therefore, we are faced with a more platter backmore extreme and more direct than the previous two releases for Nuclear Blast.
Taking a quick look at the individual qualities of the tracklist, it is a little surprising to see how the two single-videos proposed before the release, namely “Thornwyck Hymn” and “The 2nd Of Three Bells”, turn out to be, on balance, the two least convincing songs of the lot, crafted to perfection by the group but which certainly don’t stand out for who knows what emotional peaks – as instead did for example the two extracts from “The Ghost Of Orion”, “Tired Of Tears” and “Your Broken Shore”. And we don’t understand why a track like “A Starving Heart” wasn’t chosen as a possible single, another well-orchestrated professional composition, with a romantic appeal and a more captivating chorus that would have performed better. Or even the final “Crushed Embers”, nine minutes of exemplary ups and downs between all the progressive facets of the doom-gothic metal of our British champions, without neglecting a delicate tearful refrain.
There are two other songs, however, that we would like to point out to you as highlights of “A Mortal Binding”, our favourites: the first “Her Dominion”, all in growl singing, short – ‘only’ just over six minutes – powerful, with excellent bass-violin interactions, a simple and deadly riffing, ultimately a nice initial ‘pat’; and then the monolith of the album, “The Apocalyptist”, exceeding the critical threshold of eleven minutes of duration but not for this reason boring, on the contrary, yet another demonstration of how Bride master the most disparate minutes with expert savoir-faire, bringing to very high levels their seminal take on dark music.
Since there is no other possible rating, at least to our ears, to give to the new work by Aaron and his associates, we place the most reassuring of the 7.5 on the cover artwork above: one can no longer claim a miracle or a masterpiece when faced with the mastery of the genre these six artists, after all, the class is always there to imbue every note, impossible not to perceive. Welcome back for the umpteenth time.