Iris

I feel a bit misled by Iris, because while I downloaded the fairly massive Hypnotic Dirge back catalogue from Bandcamp (it’s sold as a ridiculously good value bundle) the cover art to this second Altars Of Grief full-length stuck out, and I remembered it as “that worthwhile doom album I wanted”. With hindsight, it’s worthwhile, but I would be doing wrong to call Iris a doom album. Parts of the listen certainly move slowly, a few nods are made to Katatonia and Isole, particularly in the title track, and violin plays a large role on a few songs, notably the opening of ‘Child of Light’, though this seems much more a (post-)black metal listen than anything I know as doom. (Out of interest, what I’ve just called violin is credited as cello.)

Genre considerations aside, the composition of this 56 minute experience gives a weighty impression, for 2 main reasons. One relates to the impactful musical style that Altars Of Grief employ, and the other is the quintet’s passion. Both from production and from playing style, impact gets employed to various effects, in part setting up the dynamics of Iris as a quiet/loud album in addition to a slow/fast one, but also differentiating emotions from one another, which plays a considerable part in the overall appeal of the listen. Opener ‘Isolation’ presents a good enough case to make an example: the lengthy clean introduction meets weighty drumming without losing its melodic sheen, the clean vocals of Damien Smith having first use, then we begin to immerse in the slower black metal textures by the 4 minute mark, escalating to more epic environs by way of the post-rock guitar leads behind the growls. One instance of more punishing blackened playing does emerge on this epic track, yet it doesn’t take the blunter partner song ‘Desolation’ long for thundering blasts to take over and the whole band to weigh in on the listener. Trust me when I say that Iris has plenty of weight when it wants to.

Also, when I said passion, you can add a capital ‘P’ as you see fit. I haven’t read the lyrics in detail and I don’t think I have to in order to know that Altars Of Grief often sing about religious content, though don’t let that affect your judgement too much since the passion I’m referring to works about as well as typical life, death, and extremity emotion. A standout track for me since the first listen was ‘Becoming Intangible’: for one thing the gorgeous vocals and lush cleanness of the first couple of minutes protrudes a mile after the climactic end to ‘Voices of Winter’, but the focus that the band maintain during the whole 9 minutes also ought to be applauded, especially since the fast-paced middle part ignores lyrics for inspiring chanting and several interconnected musical movements. When the song returns to the original clean verse in crushing electric style, it really concludes the album with a proper finale. As the speaker in the lyrics prepares to die, Smith wails, for the third time in the song, “I’ve never felt this close to God.”

As a whole, Iris doesn’t really need to stick to a genre to work well, funnelling doom death, North American black metal, post-rock, and a few strands of classical music into a whole that spans a range of moods and emotions, which are used as the driving factor of the album rather than the playing style. I feel the album sway and shift beneath my scrutiny, but in the end I’m happy to let it do so because Altars Of Grief seem to know just where they are headed.