THE DREADFUL HOURS

An excellent trademark My Dying Bride bringing epic to spectacular heights while bridging death/doom beginnings by the band with later slow doom approach. The first track is a magnificient tour de darkness overture with black/death- metal rhythms, excellent growls and majestic keyboards. Black dark spitting atmosphere can be cut by its density. Still, the simple mellow guitar motive from the beginning reappears like a silent stream of water.

The same in a more black-metal fashion goes for the second epic track with a great doom riff "The raven and the rose". The singer exceeds himself with whimsical growling before rapidly descending into a mourning funeral territory with guitar and violin. Piano and organ enrich the sound of the epic track. Absolute feast for gothic/doom metal lovers.

"Black heart romance" is a light slow doom metal song with delicate post-rock/space-rock guitar and good drum work.

Good doomy/heavy metal influnce can be observed at "My hope, the destroyer"

"The deepest of all hearts" has an epic motive with intensive bass drums and synthetizer chorals in the background.

The last and longest composition is slow but majestic and vocals starts accompanying violin with a growling contrast. There is one of the most sinister and gloomy guitar riffs off the whole album. Sabbathical mood is quite evident in this track, where riffs are not very heavy but doomy enough.

The wild ending black/death metal section is quite suprising and may be a bit out of place of this quite trademark doom metal composition.