Bell Witch’s gutsy entrance into the realm of full-length recorded
music contains only six tracks. Each climbing,
darkly poetic song on Longing,
funereal in tone, slogging toward the grave, stretches the album into epic
territory, giving the release an equally epic running time.
Like Japandroids, Bell Witch showcases a duo capable of
producing sounds much larger and more impaling than their size suggests. Using
only a distorted bass and drums combination, in a manner as menacing though
hardly as chaotic as noise rock outfits in the surging vein of Lightning Bolt, the act bring a heavy dirge-like sorrow to
their songs. A sense of weight and
tragedy is made palpably burdensome through the heft of the music alone.
Though the guttural growls and rocketing screams of drummer
Adrian Guerra, as noted by Pitchfork, are fairly standard for the doom metal
genre, Bell Witch is saved by bassist Dylan Desmond’s frailer, shriller, less
conventional voice. Desmond sings as if praying or offering up hymns to some ancient,
towering god. There is an accepting bliss to his calmer, more widened vocal
approach. On “Rows (of endless waves),” Desmond cries out across a sea of
troubles, an ocean of worry he must sail on, navigating the Scylla and
Charybdis of mental schism on his Odyssean journeys while exhibiting stunning
delivery.
Lyrical imagery on Longing
is violent and anguished, yet scenically expansive in a grand, historic way. An
audio clip from the Poe-inspired film The
Masque of the Red Death (1964) used in “Beneath the Mask,” further deepens
the album’s literate characteristics. Longing,
however, is more of a soundtrack to a postmodern retelling of a Greek classic, a
doom-rock ode to human despair as old as myth, than it is a collection of
memorable songs. It is music as experience, nearly symphonic in scope,
grappling with mortal misery with maximal expressiveness but limited foundational
variation.
Grade: B
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