DEATHBELL: A Nocturnal Crossing (DOOM): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

Once is not usual, the honorable Svart Records makes infidelities to its native Finland by releasing "A Nocturnal Crossing", the second trip of Deathbell, a French band whose silence for four years was not without worrying us. Would "With The Beyond" be condemned to remain without heirs? Unfortunately, we were beginning to believe it but its late successor finally comes to sweep away our fears.

This return is realized under the best auspices. A demanding label and an artwork signed by Adam Burke, author of a plethora of covers (for Hooded Menace, Evoken...) announce a change of division for the band whose reputation should be able to go beyond the simple circle of a few doomers. For those who don't know it yet, Deathbell officiates in a heavy and dolorous register that is surrounded by a misty female voice. So, it's doom with a female singer.

"One more!" some will exclaim while others will be delighted to pick up again a combination that rarely disappoints, especially since the Frenchmen are not without an asserted personality which, without erasing the invariants proper to the genre, owes a lot to the ghostly solemnity of the vocal lines as well as to the Victorian shimmering of keyboards with liturgical tints. Two features on which "A Nocturnal Crossing" relies for our greatest happiness, and which, as its superb visual declares it, is colored with an even more dreamlike dimension.

If the heavy occult doom of the beginnings still remains some ornaments, like 'Shifting Sands' evocative of Blood Ceremony or The Devil's Blood, the music forged by the quintet is now adorned with more atmospheric, even progressive, ornaments, what testifies for example the enormous 'The Ladder', heavy cathedral which, from the top of its almost nine minutes, spreads evolutionary effluences but always sewn by riffs of brass and hemmed with an underground bitterness.

Moreover, the group shows a science of the composition extremely worked, giving birth to true jewels of writing, atmospheres and progression. Darkly fairy-like, 'The Stronghold And The Archer' bewitches, lined with mellow synths, 'Devoured On The Peak' has something of an adventurous but dramatic tale of which the ghostly voice of Lauren is the sententious guide. Never does the opus escape from a misty and romantic chiaroscuro ('Silent The Comes'), all along numbed by a motionless delicacy.

After four years of silence, Deathbell comes back bigger with "A Nocturnal Crossing" which inoculates to the heaviness of the doom the velvet of progressive sonorities, dreamy work although always struck by the seal of a sad darkness. - Official website

DEATHBELL

A NOCTURNAL CROSSING

SVART RECORDS

DOOM