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Russia’s
The Morningside crafts melodic doom metal and by melodic we
mean, this is some pretty fucking sad and melancholic stuff.
Never void of beauty the music of The Morningside brings to the
front the most sentimental aspects of classic bands like Opeth
and Katatonia. You got your heavy and you got your more calmed
airy pieces. One way or the other you know that both extremes
are bound to collide, but they never do. For the most part the
music is pretty calmed; the songs smoothly flow from quiet clear
stringed balladry to open slow heavy riffs, usually accented by
a bittersweet solo. Like most doomsters, The Morningside are
quite keen to long musical passages that altogether ignore
vocals. In this camp some of the songs from The Wind, the
Trees and the Shadows of the Past recall some of Agalloch’s
superior Ashes Against the Grain.
But the vocals
are a totally different issue. They are the type of stuff that
belongs to a Satanic black metal band; killer deep and demonic
to the max, they counterbalance the depth of the music, and
curiously enough, help the overall flow of the album experience
giving it more of a peaks and valleys feel. There are clean
vocals too; on the twelve minutes long “The Shadow of the Past”
for example, they come as natural and unassuming as the nature
pictures that adorn the insert. That too, gives the album a
whole different feel.
Released by a
subsidiary of Solitude Productions, Bad Mood Man (I had one hell
of a time finding this one as I kept on typing Bad Moon Man)
which specializes in ambient, minimalist and metal music, The
Wind, the Trees and the Shadows of the Past is promising
work. It got me curious about the band and I’d sincerely like to
learn more about them. The problem is I searched and searched
for them but was unable to find any official site or MySpace
page. Aside a few reviews there is virtually no information
about them. The insert itself doesn’t help as all the credits
are in Russian.
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