Novembers Doom - Bled White
The End Records
Death/Doom Metal
11 songs (1'08'21'')
Release year: 2014
Novembers Doom, The End Records
Reviewed by Jared
Album of the year

Interestingly enough, one of my favorite albums I had listened to from 2013 didn’t come from that year. In the midst of reviewing new material, I fell upon Aphotic by Novembers Doom, and boy was this album more than welcomed. After taking some time to do a little “band searching” I stumbled upon a great review by Alex on their 2009 release, The Pale Haunt Departure, and immediately found myself lost in brilliance of this doom influenced death metal. It’s been three years since the release of Aphotic, but I took that time to listen to everything this band had at their disposal. Needless to say, their newest album Bled White could not come soon enough.

Bled White begins with some dark sounding riffs in the self-titled opening track. The vocals from Paul Kuhr are also layered beautifully and echo in a shadowy gloom. He has impressed me in the past with his versatility of roaring with the deepest sounding death metal vocals to the most creepily beautiful clean singing that can bring some serious emotion. It’s all found here in Bled White, especially within one of the better tracks on the album, Heartfelt, that does this extremely well.

The album becomes slower and sadder very quick with Just Breath. The depressed clean guitars set the tone well for a melancholic atmosphere. In addition, the vocals found here are completely clean and solemnly sweet. A piano emerges about halfway through to give this track a haunting feeling, but the solid musicianship, especially within the guitars towards the songs end, takes this track to more epic ends. A short instrumental piece, Scorpius, follows immediately after. The purely acoustic guitars are very mature in sound and are draped in a rather depressed mood but nonetheless sounding very calming and lovely in nature.

The album still shows some serious death metal aggression. One of the more tenacious and furious tracks, The Brave Pawn, contains tougher and overall meaner riffs to give the album a good balance from its more melancholic states, to a fiery attitude. It sounds a bit more thrash at times and the drums become obviously crueler and the death metal side truly emerges. But Novembers Doom is not all about making music that is entirely death metal in sound. They strive for more emotionally dark atmosphere, and Bled White does this perfectly. The Grand Circle is great mix of somber and soothing moments, especially within Kuhr’s vocals, but it also stays true to sounding threatening and unafraid to go from more mournful moments to a harsher and more venomous sound.

Novembers Doom tack on plenty of emotion and rage all-in-one with Bled White. It’s great to see that after a three year gap between albums that they are right back on their game with yet another solid and fantastic release. Bled White will no doubt be consuming my ears for a long time. After finishing the album a few times over, there is no question that this will stay with me strongly for the remainder of the year and will be very difficult to top.

Killing Songs :
All
Jared quoted 95 / 100
Other albums by Novembers Doom that we have reviewed:
Novembers Doom - Amid Its Hallowed Mirth reviewed by Jared and quoted 70 / 100
Novembers Doom - Aphotic reviewed by Jared and quoted 91 / 100
Novembers Doom - The Novella Reservoir reviewed by Alex and quoted 90 / 100
Novembers Doom - The Pale Haunt Departure reviewed by Alex and quoted 90 / 100
Novembers Doom - To Welcome the Fade reviewed by Alex and quoted 77 / 100
To see all 7 reviews click here
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