My Dying Bride - For Lies I Sire (2009)

I could tell you I'm not the biggest My Dying Bride fan in the world, nor really a fan at all, but on occasion the band has done something to surprise me, and they have released a few worthy crushers like The Light at the End of the World or the underrated 34.788%..Complete. For Lies I Sire isn't much of a crusher, in fact it reinforces my theory that playing slow does not always make you sound as doomed as playing slow with a proper organization of notes into effective riffs. This is the style of 'Calgon take me away' doom metal which unfortunately adorns a great many albums in their catalog, replete with violins and very gothic textures. Oh, the woe!

Aaron's clean vocal style still sets the band apart, and I will admit that despite my disdain for the album as a whole, he delivers one of his better performances (though the supporting music is extremely weak). The album does have a few tracks, like "Fall With Me", where my boredom began to lift in the sonic, slow grooving black textures of the riffing and creepy whispering. "A Chapter in Loathing" has some blackish metal vocals and breaks for some background chanting and ambient whispers which are a stark and refreshing change from the surrounding mediocre tracks. If the album featured more tracks such as these and less like the brooding and dull pandering of "Echoes from a Hollow Soul" or "Shadowhaunt", I probably would have drawn more from it.

I realize the very point of this band is to remain bleak at all times and offer only the slightest sliver of silver light, but I simply wasn't swayed by the vast majority of the writing. It's one of the cases in which I found myself staring at my watch, wondering when this would end, yet with the exception of the first two tracks mentioned above, I found no reprieve. The band is in prime form as far as the production standards; the use of strings is both subtle when necessary and boldened seemlessly during the swelling of its more passionate excursions into an emotional void. The lyrics aren't terrible but they do contain many of the same dull cliched expressions and numerous references to angel wings, 'she does this, she does that' and the like. Granted many metal bands and genres have their lyrical cliches, but in this case they are far from favorable.

I'd love to once again be pulverized into blackest despair by My Dying Bride, but this isn't the album to do it.

Verdict: Fail [4.5/10]

http://www.mydyingbride.org/