(About 10 days ago Nuclear Blast released the 15th studio album from My Dying Bride, and DGR has sat with it long enough to now provide his thoughts below.)
My Dying Bride‘s newest release A Mortal Binding is a surprisingly turbulent album by My Dying Bride standards. Though My Dying Bride have been an adaptive beast over the course of a long-running career, the group have cycled back around into an interesting amalgamation of modern day doom and their early miserable forms.
Yet My Dying Bride have been the civilized and staid older-sibling of the doom scene, awash with despair yet seeming more ‘refined’ than their cohort bands. No stranger to longform song writing either, it hadn’t been until 2020’s The Ghost Of Orion that they forged themselves into a stately yet concise version of what they’d been before. Granted, they almost immediately followed that up with Macabre Cabaret, an EP with a ten-minute song as its opener, but it seemed like My Dying Bride had found a strong comfort zone with the fragile and mournful atmospheres of The Ghost Of Orion.
Which is what makes A Mortal Binding quite the followup.
Similar run-times yet with one fewer song and musically a lot more in line with a ship being rocked by waves from all directions than the bleak pictures that came before it. A Mortal Binding is a musical working through of a whole lot of issues and the storms and barely-held-together beauty that follows it. No wonder then that the artwork focuses heavily on a cracked pendant and nature surrounding it.
A Mortal Binding‘s seven songs stand distinct from one another, seven starkly different journeys through yawning chasms of slow-moving melodrama. My Dying Bride‘s sound hasn’t changed tremendously in the four years between releases, but on A Mortal Binding the band’s objective seems to be exploring as many different takes on it as they could muster. The result is an album that is surprisingly consistent in its heaviness, containing more traditional death metal roars than the album preceding it and also a little quicker on its feet in a few of the songs.
My Dying Bride have long been defined by their use of a violin with backing keyboard orchestrations and the long, sweeping passages written for them to soar above or cut through like a blade. Many of those are still present and madly waving their hand to be counted among the songs in A Mortal Binding – you’ll still get plenty of the slow crash with a melodic line scratching its way out above it. Yet, for all of those there’re just as many times when the band do pick up the tempo a bit. You’d never notice it right away, but the run from “Her Dominion” to the two early introductory singles of “Thornwyck Hymn” and “The 2nd of Three Bells” do have a little ‘get up and move’ to them in their average six and a half minutes of time.
After those three pass on into the night, A Mortal Binding is happy to dish out the expected and hallmark My Dying Bride sound for a few songs. Songs get longer and yes, heftier in their step, in the back half of A Mortal Binding. The track times increase immediately with the seven minutes of “Unthroned Creed” and this is also where the band lean back a bit into the sound that defined much of this album’s paired predecessors.
My Dying Bride even plant an epic that moves into the double-digits in the form of “The Apocalyptist” soon after that – which plays out like slamming a few different eras of the band’s sound together, split into equal thirds and then walking between them and picking whatever flowers grew after. It may, over time, become one of the defining songs of A Mortal Binding. Where other songs seem happily exploratory or oft-tempted to get as heavy as feasibly possible, “The Apocalyptist” is written with a sharp focus to it. It’s not meant to be a friendlier song with an eleven plus minute weight on the scale, but does guarantee that it’s the most ‘grand doom’ epic within this collective of songs.
A Mortal Binding is an absolutely perfect release, but this many years into My Dying Bride‘s career sees the band sticking to a relatively stable core sound. They’re going to do what they do best, and if anything, what keeps A Mortal Binding interesting isn’t the fact that the group are constantly reassuring you that they’re still My Dying Bride, but that even when they’re reaching further out within a song, they can still change and adapt anything to fit within their particular guidelines.
A Mortal Binding is a more dynamic and rockier album because of that; it seems less content to sit in one place for as long a time as My Dying Bride are generally used to, and often responds to the staid civility that has carried many an Aaron Stainthorpe vocal wail with an equally violent roar. There’s something beginning to boil just underneath the surface of A Mortal Binding‘s waters, and no amount of dramatic doom and sweeping violin line seems fit to contain it at first, even during the longer songs placed in the back half of the disc.
Within those bounds, it is still a recognizably My Dying Bride disc, but one where the ever-shifting landscape is appreciated as it keeps things interesting. That constant creative shift gives the album a tension that brings it to life; you want to see where My Dying Bride are headed within each song, and sometimes you just want to hear them crush everything underfoot with the next ‘force of a gas station explosion’ snare=drum hit that brings the stringed instrumentation hammering down with it.
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