traptunderice wrote:
Album is great. We should start a thread, but how loose the song structure are and the lack of big monstrous riffs are my only two faults for the album. Maybe the loose structure just kinda works, but it irks me for now. Maybe it will give the album some legs to grow on me. I think the riff in the title track is great, but even better is the string composition in it. And yeah, the vocals are straight out of Dreadful Hours and it is amazing.
I think the primary reason the song structures frustrated me was because indeed when a big riff came along it almost immediately disappeared, though sometimes it would briefly reappear. This was a pretty jarring surprise because MDB generally is known for sticking to a good riff, if not overplaying it. I was hoping for more of the arpeggios from And My Father Left Forever too, but the guitars really take a backseat overall in performance and production, providing more texture and less punch than they did on The Dreadful Hours.
I think the song structures themselves will otherwise prove to be a net positive as I'm still discovering parts I missed from To Shiver in Empty Halls, Cold New Curse, I Celebrate your Skin, and Within a Sleeping Forest the first 6/7 times I heard them. The production, structures, and some of the lyrics even all aim for a creepy, unsettling mood, and they achieve it in a tremendous way, even if part of me would prefer the huge riff-heavy doom/death sections repeated for several minutes like from the end of the Barghest or Raven and the Rose from The Dreadful Hours.
And A Thorn of Wisdom is an experiment gone very right. Someone called that Tryptykon influenced, regardless I hope they do more of that in the future.