Mourning Beloveth - The Sullen Sulcus

The other night the power was out here, so I lay there in the pitch black and sweltering heat with no entertainment available except my battery powered portable CD player. I put this CD on and it made perfect sense. All the frustrating gloom I felt at that time was contained in these songs. Six songs in 65 minutes. That tells you right there this is doom metal.

This Irish doom band has been kicking around in some form or another since 1992 but this is only their second album after 2000’s Dust. Recording at Academy Studios in England with producer Mags, they are obviously following in the footsteps of the seminal British doom bands that recorded there in the 90’s. I always hate the inevitability of having to compare every new doom metal band to those early 90’s Brits like My Dying Bride, Anathema, and Paradise Lost (only MDB actually still plays doom metal today). Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, since it has prevented a glut of mediocrity in this genre), there are few bands that play this style of music, so there are few reference points in trying to compare a new band.

Mourning Beloveth keep things basic with a formula of massive gray granite slabs of power chord riffs and regal, symphonic leads that lull you into the paradoxically miserable-yet-joyful stupor that the best doom metal strives for. Traditional doom growls dominate the vocals, though there are a few brief sung passages and some spoken parts that actually sound cool with the Irish accent (Irish and British seem to be the only accents that can pull off these ponderous spoken word bits without sounding goofy). The lyrics are descriptions of various forms of misery, nothing new to the world, but well-written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness paragraph form that makes a good read. Plus there's great song titles like "The Words That Crawled" and "It Almost Looked Human".