(Two weeks ago Prophecy Productions released a new album-length song from the German horror metal poets The Vision Bleak, their first new music in 8 years, and below you’ll find DGR‘s attempt to make a review of it.)
The halls of NoCleanSinging are no stranger to groups with a large amount of time passing between releases. Upon awakening from a deep slumber, the halls of this site are many times the first thing that the slowly-awakening-back-to-consciousness groups see. We’ve premiered bands that’ve had decade-plus times of inactivity to their names while members ventured elsewhere, explored with other bands, or even enjoyed the more mundane side of things by maintaining a stable day job.
The resurrected’s first few hesitant steps can be flat-footed and precariously balanced but it has happened enough that it’s a familiar sound by the NoCleanSinging doorstep. That’s why we’re familiar with how a project like The Vision Bleak could’ve entered a near-eight-year hibernation following the release of a pretty goddamned good album in the form of 2016’s The Unknown and how after all this time the project could return to us with something equally as crazy sounding, a forty-one minute single song known as Weird Tales.
photos by Lukasz Jaszak
It has been a long time since yours truly has tackled a single-song release styled as an album. Though there’ve been many that’ve painted themselves as being part of a larger suite or one particular movement, very few have had the the fortitude to actually slam them all together into a single song. The one sticking out the most right now would be the period in which we had Gorgut’s Pleides Dust and Necrosavant’s Aniara MMXIV milling around the site at about the same time.
They make for strange reviews too, since you can’t single out a particular song or do more than narrow down to broader segments – though The Vision Bleak were nice enough to break each movement into its own lyrical segment, as the overarching theme of Weird Tales is pretty much what it says. The Vision Bleak use Weird Tales to gather together just that, tales of gothic drama and woe, horror stories, and twisted nightmares turned into song, all with the gravelly intonation one would expect from the band whose first full-length was titled The Deathship Has A New Captain (9 Songs Of Death, Doom, and Horror). Interesting then, that the band return with a gathering of songs with a similar driving force almost two decades later.
But, much like many of our insurance companies like to paint themselves by saying ‘you’re in good hands’ in the face of a disaster, you could probably ascribe the same – and be far more accurate – to The Vision Bleak and their gothic melodrama turned metal artform. Even with an eight-year gap in releases, Weird Tales shows that the band are just as reliable as they’ve ever been,
A single album-length song is a tall order; it’s difficult to keep a listener’s interest for that whole time and has mostly been the realm of prog-metal diehards and doom groups – those of the funeral and stoner variety. The things to look for change as well, and so much of the initial analysis of a song like “Weird Tales” isn’t so much about whether it can hold your interest but just how well it justifies its existence.
It can be just as fun listening to the song for its initial ‘peaks and valleys’ dynamic as it is looking for the cuts and edits, or the times when the band decided to take a breather in order to change the stage background for the next drama to unfold. The Vision Bleak place a few of these throughout Weird Tales but don’t make many sweeping changes to the overall instrumentation.
The haunted bells that serve as the opening moments remain the haunted bells throughout the album, and the moment there is an utterance of a violin within the first few segments of the song, a violin is added. Other than that, The Vision Bleak stick to their tried-and-true of a twenty-plus year career and construct the song out of all their favorite tropes and guitar riffs, save for the final moments of “Weird Tales” as a song wherein they almost transform entirely into a being that could best be described as the mirror-morphed reflection of My Dying Bride‘s recent incarnation.
The Vision Bleak‘s current label Prophecy Productions put out a compilation album in 2016 entitled Timeline – An Introduction to The Vision Bleak which served as an hour and fifteen minute guide through the group’s career at the time. Funnily enough and probably unintentionally, it seems that the band have done their own version of this with Weird Tales eight years later, because the song itself comprises not only a handful of horrid tales but also seems to be the band touring through their wider discography, condensing and congealing it into one solid and cohesive piece of music.
In other words, if you’ve been a longtime fan you’ll note not only the renewed font of creativity seeming to course through the song that is Weird Tales but also how the band love to fall back into what has worked for them before, whether it be their hallmark bass-heavy intonation in regards to lyrics or the harsh and clean interchange.
The distance between releases tends to neutralize the ability to compare albums. Once you’ve reached the ballpark-estimate of a changing of generations, releases feel like the relaunch of a band – which may partially lend credence to this burgeoning theory of how Weird Tales also serves as an overall codex and guide to The Vision Bleak‘s career. The band changes and so too do the people behind it; the group’s most recent press photos would be just as fitting within a photoshoot for Wayfarer as it would be for themselves. Yet The Vision Bleak are still recognizably The Vision Bleak, taking many of the lessons learned throughout the years and the things that worked for them on 2016’s The Unknown and refining it.
Forty-one minutes can seem like being asked to vault over a brick wall with bags of sand serving as your shoes, yet The Vision Bleak keep Weird Tales interesting throughout. There’re a handful of obvious cuts and breaks where the venue staff has to change the background and props for the next scene taking place, but Weird Tales works hard to justify its existence as a singular entity. It’s a brave move putting out a release like this after so long in frozen dormancy, but it is one that has worked out well for The Vision Bleak here.
http://lnk.spkr.media/tvb-weird-tales
https://www.facebook.com/thevisionbleak.official