THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD

After two masterful albums in the early 90's, MDB quickly disappeared from my radar. The following three albums were average at best and didn't seem to capture the magic of the early days. So if MDB wanted to regain any credibility amongst their fans and the metal press, their sixth album really had to deliver.

And luckily they did.

MDB sounds reborn, they returned to the epic grandeur of the early years, but it's not a mindless return. The album also integrates the feel for melody that MDB had developed over the preceding albums. The violin player has been replaced by dark symphonic keyboards that complete the crunchy guitars perfectly. The harmonic development of the riffs and chords is brilliant, especially on the albums highlights such as She Is Dark, The Isis Script and the monstrous Edenbeast. If anyone doubted MDB's Prog credentials, then here is where you'll find them abundantly. Superb 5 star progressive doom bliss here.

Also the firing Fever Sea and the touching sadness of the closing Sear Me III are excellent. Next to the songwriting quality, the best surprise comes from Aaron's vocals. Not only did he manage to give his clean vocals an understated power smouldering with inner fire, he also found his confidence back to unleash his raw vocals again, varying sinister rasps, rough shrieks and low growls. He's really a great vocalists when he has inspired music and melodies to back him up.

There are a couple of lesser moments, the title track is rather dreary in its slow parts, Into The Lake of Ghost struggles through its bland verses, and Christliar sounds a bit formulaic. But mostly the material is either superb or very good.

The Light at the End of the World is the first in a string of three very solid MDB albums that form the pinnacle of their discography for me. Highly recommended for fans of Opeth, Agalloch and Edge Of Sanity.

MY Dying Bride is one of my fav bands when talking about extreme metal. A band that remains big and well known across the years even they had some more experimental albums in their catalogue in contrast with the excellent rough and in same time very elaborated releases like this one. After not so succesfull previous album, quite experimental and very commercial in places, they return after a year in 1999 with, their most acomplished album they ever done - The Light at the End of the World. Released at Peaceville records, this is a huge succes in their career, and for sure one of the best albums ever made from extreme rought metal music, simply said this is excellent. Some line-up changes and Calvin Robertshaw, guitarist of My Dying Bride since their very beginning, and Bill Law, drummer of the band only for "34.788% Complete", are no longer part of the doomed family of My Dying Bride. This time all the guitars have been performed by Andrew Craighan and Shaun Steels fills the empty seat of the drummer, holding this position with his worth up to nowadays. The keybords are made by Bal- Sagoth member - Jonny Maudling who done a realy great job here, his splendid choruse fiting perfectly with rough riffs of the band. The keyboard melodies float in the air like a funereal chant, adorning the soundscape with their serene and wailing melodies or with their more intense and darker sound. If the instrumental passages are simply amazing, very elaborated for such music, complex, well performed and well written aswell, the voice of Aaron Stainthorpe is very beautiful and in same place very harsh, each time the vocal lines are excellent, melting with the music in a perfect unison. Whether he howls, grunts, recites or sings he sounds so real, so emotional. I can say hat this voice and the jaw dropping escalades he done here is perfect for such music, One of my fav albums ever made, perfect, complex and very enjoyble. 5 stars for sure, a truly master work of the genre that must be recive the aplause they desearve. Warmly recommended.

"The Light at the End of the World" is the 6th full-length studio album by UK doom metal act My Dying Bride. The album was released through Peaceville Records in October 1999. There have been two lineup changes since the release of "34.788%... Complete (1998)" as drummer Bill Law has been replaced by Shaun Steels and guitarist Calvin Robertshaw has left too. The latter has been a member of the band since 1990 and is not replaced on this album, where Andy Craighan handles all guitars. Robertshaw does play on the closing track "Sear Me III" though in a capacity of session musician.

...after the rather experimental "34.788%... Complete (1998)" album, the band opted to return to more familiar ground with "The Light at the End of the World". There´s a small surprise in store though. The album sees a return of the death growls that had been absent from the band´s last three releases. The growling vocals are of course paired with lead vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe´s melancholic and paatos filled clean vocals, but with the growls back in the music it´s hard not to think of the band´s first two albums. There´s quite a big difference here though as there is no violin on the album. An instrument that was a dominant part of the first two albums. Instead (and this was also the case on "34.788%... Complete (1998)") there are some atmosphere creating keyboards added to the instrumental basis of guitar, bass and drums. The keyboards add just the right majestic atmosphere for the brick heavy yet melodic doom metal songs. They are not omnipresent though, and only appear when they are called for.

The album is 71:09 minutes long and I don´t think it´s all the material on the album that reaches excellence, but tracks like the strong opener "She Is the Dark", "Edenbeast", , the title track, "The Isis Script", and "Sear Me III" are all examples of My Dying Bride doing what they do best. Delivering beautiful, majestic, and sorrowfilled doom metal with great conviction and burning passion.

The sound production is powerful and suits the music well. I´m taken places when I listen to this album and never do I have to worry that the illusion is broken by something that sits wrong in the mix or distracts from the listening experience. At the end of the day "The Light at the End of the World" may not be My Dying Bride´s strongest album release, but it´s a great album in it´s own right. I´m not completely blown away by the album altough it has grown considerably on me over the years but a 3.5 - 4 star (75%) rating is still deserved.

'The Light At The End Of The World' - My Dying Bride (8/10)

Doom is alive. After '34.788% Complete', My Dying Bride had raised some eyebrows, with some fans even being led to believe that the band had finally lost their marbles. What better thing for the band to do then, than to return to what they did best, being epic hymns of emotionally powerful gothic doom metal. 'The Light At The End Of The World' could be said to be an album where the band tries to give their fans more of what they want, but they certainly have not sold out. Instead of the total return to form that some fans were expecting with this album, there is a more melodic vibe on the album, without losing any of the sense of despair that they so expertly crafted with their early material.

The title track from 'The Light At The End Of The World' was the first thing I had ever heard from My Dying Bride, and I will say with conviction that it is still my most beloved track by them to date. Although there are quite a few other excellent pieces on the album, the title track here is on another level altogether, while still presenting everything that the album represents. There are doomy riffs and highly melodic playing on the lower register of the guitar, brooding drums and symphonic keyboards to add a sense of added eerieness, class, and atmosphere. Leading this sombre mix are Aaron Stainthorpe's clean vocals, which- quite like the guitars- are in a lower register, and full of melancholic sadness. The lyrics reflect the feel of the music naturally, and with the title track, it paints a devastating psychological fantasy of a man tending a lighthouse, completely alone. He is given the chance from a god to see his lost love for a single night again, only to find she has disappeared once again in the morning. It is a fairly simple story, but the way it is told through the music makes it one of the greatest love stories i have ever heard.

The other tracks here are admittedly less powerful for me after having developed such a strong connection to that one piece, but there are plenty of great things here. 'Edenbeast', 'Sear Me III' and 'The Isis Script' are all songs that also stand out, and while the songwriting is something that I would come to expect from My Dying Bride, it is done beautifully. It should be mentioned though that the songwriting is not perfectly consistent, with tracks like 'Christliar' feeling a little recycled and underwhelming, if only for the fact that it pales in the greatness of the other things that the album offers. One thing that could have been changed here however is the length of the album. In general, I would tend to favour brevity rather than something being too long, and due to the fact that most of the music here keeps the melancholic downtempo metal fairly stable in style, it can tend to feel overdrawn, even if there is good quality in the music all the way through. Besides that, 'The Light At The End Of The World' is a fantastic album for My Dying Bride, and even for its title track alone, I would recommend it to any lover of melancholic, yet heavy music.

6/10

"The Light At The End Of The World" is a decent return to a style that is more traditional of My Dying Bride.

My Dying Bride are one of the most well known and respected Doom Metal acts of all time. With such a high reputation, this band has managed to consistently release some great albums over the years, in particular their third album "Turn Loose The Swans" and it's follow up, "The Angel and The Dark River", both of these released in the mid nineties. After a few, more disappointing albums, the band return to shine, in the eyes of many fans, with 1999's "The Light at The End Of The World".

This release of theirs is quite unlike what they have ever done; this is thus far the darkest, most unsettling and disturbing album the band has released. The desperation of previous albums seem to be almost a joke compared to this extremely emotionally difficult album. The sound itself hasn't drastically changed, but there is a more frequent use of subtle synthesizers, more extreme vocals (which seem to be more Black Metal influenced this time around), and a bit faster-paced melodies. While it may not be the Doomiest album of the band, it is the grimmest and most pessimistic, despite only slight stylistic changes.

The concepts brought up are not estranged to other Doom Metal material, nor to other My Dying Bride lyrics: pain, suffering, revenge, hopelessness, and quite a few religious themes are what the lyrics portray, and there are some interesting stories depicted too; in the title track, the story is of a man who is forced to guard an everlastingly deserted sea from a lighthouse on an isolated island. He begs his divinity for one night only with his woman, which he does get; but the following day, he will stay eternally in solitude on the island, without ever seeing a man or woman. The lyrics of the other songs are not as epic, but a couple still have an intriguing nature: "She Is The Dark" incarnates deceit and pain into a woman, while "Edenbeast" is about a feast of sin that takes place in Eden, possibly a metaphor of the presence of corruption and greed in the most unexpected places.

The songs on this release are extremely evocative, especially in the first half of the album; songs like "She Is The Dark" and "Edenbeast", other than having dark, haunting melodies, also bring to the listener the feeling of being in front of an abandoned, dark plain, where man's sins and defects are laid down and exposed. However, it is sad to see that some of the songs, during the second half of the album, are not nearly as powerful as they should: "Christliar" has an interesting structure, but does not give any emotional impact whatsoever, just like the compressed intensity of "The Fever Sea", the title track (despite it's majestic lyrics) or "Into The Lake Of Ghosts". They are not really bad tracks, they simply aren't able to accomplish the task (that is admittedly hard to do) to stay as haunting as the emotional concepts in the lyrics.

"The Light At The End Of The World" is a unique album for My Dying Bride, being also their first album, after those more experimental albums preceding it, to return to the more traditional style. However, this return isn't as successful as I would have liked; "The Dreadful Hours", the following album, will have done the job in a much more satisfactory way.

After a long period of sonic exploration beginning with the blending of death-doom and darkwave on Turn Loose the Swans, passing through the gothic-doom metal phase of The Angel and the Dark River and Like Gods of the Sun, and culminating in the experimental miscellanea of 34.788%...Complete, My Dying Bride's next move was to go straight back to death-doom on The Light At the End of the World, with both growled vocals and moments of faster playing bringing the death metal back into their formula.

And yet at the same time, this isn't As the Flower Withers Part 2. My Dying Bride have clearly learned the lessons of their sonic evolution, and the result of this is a death-doom release which the incarnation of the band who produced their early material could have never realised. It took that period of exploration to hone their craft and pick up the ideas which come together to make The Light At the End of the World such a well-crafted piece, and in fact I actually think it beats out everything that came before it. The patience of both My Dying Bride and their fanbase is amply rewarded here, and the pessimists are proved wrong: it turns out the light at the end of the world wasn't an oncoming train after all.

After the less than positively received experimental album "34.788%?Complete," MY DYING BRIDE quickly worked on damage control and did what any band would do when their fast sailing career hits a rock and starts to sink, namely retreat, go back to what worked and repeat! The band wasted no time getting back into the studio and releasing the sixth album THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD the following year with a more classic MY DYING BRIDE sound on display as if shouting out to the fanbase "hey! we were just playing around but we're back!" And back they were not only with long sprawling epic compositions that displayed the full power of the gothic doom metal that had pushed them through the 90s but with the added bonus of bringing back the death metal aspects with moments of aggressive outbursts accompanied by Aaron Stainthorpe's grating death growls.

It seems that the experimental album scared off a couple band members who weren't jiving with the new direction. Drummer Bill Law jumped ship to be replaced by Shaun Steels (formerly of Anathema) and guitarist Calvin Robertshaw stepped down as guitarist but stuck around to become the tour manager which left the band officially as a quartet however keyboardist Jonny Maudling of Bal-Sagoth was recruited as a session player. Robertshaw does appear briefly on the album as the second guitarist on "Sear Me III" which is a thematic continuation from the two previous "Sear Me's" on earlier albums which served as an extra indicator that MY DYING BRIDE was back in their comfort zone which is exactly where the rabidly hungry gothy death doom crowds wanted them. With Robertshaw out, it left Andrew Craighan as the only guitarist but he does double duty on THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD where he covers all guitar parts and does quite well i might add.

Stylistically THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE WORLD pick up where "Like Gods Of Sun" left off and pretends the album in between never happened however this is MY DYING BRIDE and despite returning to a more familiar approach never simply repeats the formula without some tweaking here and there. First thing that is noticeable is that despite the return to former glory, there is still no violin and no piano parts to be heard. Instead, the atmospheric dynamics are handled by the ambient swirls of the keyboard parts and authentically mimic and replace the mournful wails fairly well. It would have seemed unimaginable that such dreadful dirge could be lamented without the sad stringed vibrato and fastidious flexing of the bow but Maudling does an excellent job of layering the atmospheric overcast in such a fashion that it convincingly usurps its once unthinkable absence. While Stainthorpe returns to his classic plaintive goth-tinged crooning once again, this time around his style branches out more with more octaves covered and of course the return to aggressive outbursts of death growls however they only occur infrequently.

Also returning to the old formula is how the tracks sprawl out into slow plodding epics with trodding doom laden guitar riffs that take on two roles: one, chug and two, sustain. Both distorted power chords that sustain and the expected chugging doom march both are quite prevalent, however there are many twin guitar counterpoint attacks as well with more licks and solos sneaking through as well as the rare but satisfying sudden death metal attacks. In fact, this is a really a more guitar oriented album than the earlier ones that focused more on the violin and piano for much of their running time. As with most MY DYING BRIDE albums, this one too is quite consistent in its quality with each track standing out from the rest but never drifting too far away stylistically speaking. This comeback album was certainly what the doctor ordered and set the band back on track to crank out another batch of stellar albums. This is one band that dodged that proverbial bullet and the doom metal world was all the better for it.