As Strangers We Depart

Throughout the history of doom metal, the phrase “X band sounds almost supernaturally miserable” has probably been uttered countless times, quite often in hyperbole, a few times by me. Unfortunately, I’ve been wrong until now, because I’m fairly positive that Cross Vault deserve that title more than any other, being just the most pessimistic doom outfit I’ve come across in memory. Their albums have had titles like Spectres of Revocable Loss (surely much worse than irrevocable loss) and now As Strangers We Depart takes the glum to a whole new level across 43 minutes of slow music. The idea that you can know someone and yet say goodbye as if you never did certainly bears a lot of weight, but it actually appears that the Germans were thinking of a more specific form of despair when they coined the phrase. A kind of search for identity seems to go on in the title track, which, despite only featuring 2 verses of lyrics includes the line “Of whom is he the trueborn son?/Is he of both of you, or none?” The accompanying liner note also salutes “all who had to leave their home behind (whether out of free will or not) and for all of those who at some point returned - and realized that strangers they have become.” Cheery stuff, eh?

However, I wouldn’t need to read the lyrics to know that the quintet’s third full-length intended to convey the withering of the spirit. Both full-blown heavy parts and delicate acoustic moments cleave to painful slow rhythms, the lushness of the sound created by sustained notes and serious baritone vocals that layer over one another to prevent the playing sounding too sparse. Putting the most epic track first can be a risky move on any album, but ‘Golden Mending’ reaches full flow in only a couple of minutes and transfixes with the huge vocals leading the way among columns of melodic riffs, sort of like if Atlantean Kodex actually wrote rhythm guitar parts that could sustain the instrumental passages alone. Ending with a climactic solo, it ultimately represents the best of the material here, though the level across the first 4 songs remains fairly even, especially with each cut ranging over 6 minutes.

The latter part of the album doesn’t so much let quality slip as do funny things with pacing, since ‘Ravines’ takes a quick acoustic breather before the title track and then ‘Silent Wastes Untrod’ wraps up the listen as a despondent clean instrumental that achieves brief relief in a tumescent lead. Dynamically, this leaves As Strangers We Depart kind of unbalanced, since an epic journey with an emotional coda would have been preferable to most of a journey, a quick sandwich break, and then the last push to the end. To clarify, that detour doesn’t spoil the album (not more than the rotten mood, anyway), just leaves a small space for improvement. On the other hand, for floating hopelessness, not many bands do this better, only Warning, Fall Of The Idols, and Pallbearer’s early stuff coming to mind. People who stare wordlessly at the bathwater as it slips away down the plughole will find this a perfect soundtrack for their daily existence.