34.788%...COMPLETE

This took a while to grow on me. 34.788%...Complete finds My Dying Bride radically experimenting with their sound, and whilst I can respect them for not simply settling into the mode established by The Angel and the Dark River and Like Gods of the Sun, the results are somewhat variable - I've come to like some of these sonic departures a bit more than I did, but at the same time I think the band were operating well out of their comfort zone here and could have done with giving some parts of the album a bit more work before unleashing the final results.

What threw me off is that the album is trying to combine a more accessible and commercial sound with a deeply inaccessible compositional approach, with the band pivoting towards gothy-industrial rock in a sort of Marilyn Manson or Stabbing Westward vein at some points whilst at others delving in to trip-hop, but they are still basing their approach around long compositions.

If you value their death-doom sound, this will take quite some getting used to, and it's only after a while that you'll be able to piece together how they're still using the sort of song structures they always have, just with a different sonic pallette. The end result is a bit of a mixed bag - some of it has become a little dated, a little too obvious in its pursuit of the late 1990s zeitgeist, but other parts hold up - and all the songs in here will have sections that fall into both of those categories.