Cold Dead Lands

21 years after their debut, The Fate of Angles, and six years after their previous work, the American Grey Skies Fallen is back with another death/doom album to create a piece they have proven to be capable of.

The first thing which is worth mentioning in this album is its artistic cover. I am totally in favor of bands actually taking artwork into serious consideration and GSF is a band worthy of praise for their meticulous choice of album covers which are of esthetic value. This piece is a dark and sort of fantastical image of a land of doom. The shadowy and blurry atmosphere in which some human silhouettes and an obelisk are barely visible on top of some coastal rocks has created a nightmarish sight. It is indeed a glimpse into a cold dead land. Thumbs up to the artist Travis Smith, who has previously worked with giants like Death, Katatonia, Amorphis, Iced Earth, Anathema and Opeth, for creating yet another superb work of art.

The musical style of this album resembles the band’s previous work in their representation of the darkness of doom and the ferocity of death. The riffs are made up of all the common elements in this domain of music, even borrowing from epic doom and atmospheric doom here and there to enrich the listeners’ experience. The highlights of the album are the sections in which they give rein to melody and atmosphere over mere dragging riffs and dead tempos which are quite prevalent in commonplace doom albums. These two styles of composition are conjoined on almost every song; I would have liked more to have them separate so that I could know what songs are going to stand out and which ones I could skip. They all start strong but fall flat towards the end; so at the end, I am left bewildered which songs I like and which I don’t.

As far as singing is concerned, Rick Habeeb’s duality of clean vocals and growls has, for one thing, added to the diversity of sound and for another, aligned singing and music to the extent that creates a better unity between these two sometimes-detached elements. Maybe thanks to Dan Swano, this legend of metal, who has been in charge of mixing and mastering of this album, this coherence of sounds (musical and vocal) is achieved.

The subject matter for their lyrics is personal struggles and darkness of soul, despair and hopelessness. However, it does not end there and they have, certainly successfully, added an element of fantasy to their lyricism. Procession to the Tombs is the track which I liked particularly for this reason.

This album will be released on 24th of January via Xanthos music. So if you are a doomer and enjoy this genre, this album could be a decent prelude for My Dying Bride’s The Ghost of Orion.

Highlights: Procession to the Tombs - Picking Up the Pieces

Rating:
Lyrics: 7.5
Artwork: 8.5
Musicianship: 6.5
Vocals: 7.0
Overall: 7.5

originally published at NoobHeavy.com

Springing into horrid animus as the red-eyed and rotten throated futurecast corpse of mankind, cursed with regret, this fifth full-length from New York City doom metal band Grey Skies Fallen peels away the necrotic irradiated skin of passing time and lays bare all lament. The sour truth of having lived to see the finite breath of the Earth expelled sends the arc of ‘Cold Dead Lands’ through a grand circularly bent colonnade, stylistically exploring the fullest circle of the band’s career thus far while escalating their history of introspection and mournful dread for this inevitable arrival of cataclysmic choking death. Trimmed to a trio sans keyboardist and sporting roughly three years of fermenting ideation applied to their most professional render to date, no doubt Grey Skies Fallen have never sounded better.

Frustration with the ultra specificity of sub-genre identifiers might irk the oddly shuttering minds of aging metalheads but it is a necessary adaptation for the sake of communication. Huh? Well, if I just told you to go check out this ‘doom metal’ album and you’ve got fragile baby ears for the heavy lunges of classic melodic death/doom within, it could scuzz up that fickle palate needlessly. As I’d inferred, ‘Cold Dead Lands’ is perhaps unintentionally full circle in style and intentionally introspective in concept featuring brilliant strokes of modern epic heavy/doom metal applied to their earliest obsessions with melodic death/doom metal via Scandinavia and England in the mid-90’s. Album opener “Visions from the Last Sunset” lays all of this out directly with its sullen ‘The Angel and the Dark River’-era My Dying Bride feeling via clean vocals that detour into the dark spirals of October Tide and a break or two towards Katatonia‘s first record. This expert slide between pure doom metal and melodic death/doom is incredibly difficult to pull off and these New Yorkers do it without relying on ‘easy’ cheap goth metal tomfoolery, though the slight vibrato of Rick Habeeb‘s cleaner vocals will appeal more to the Candlemass cult than the Pallbearer kids.

The third track, “Procession of the Tombs” fit like a glove from the first listen. It’s lead melody hooks into a Pale Divine-esque riff that breaks into dark rant a la recent Högbom-fronted October Tide records that’d act as a sort of calibration for the tonal spectrum of ‘Cold Dead Lands’ on future listens. The significance of this is more apparent if you’ve followed Grey Skies Fallen throughout their career which began as a fairly typical combination of mid-paced melodic death/doom that’d found distinction with prominent keyboard performances. Their debut (‘The Fate of Angels‘, 1999) holds up well enough but by the time they’d released ‘Two Way Mirror’ in 2006 they’d lost me along with many bands feeling out their takes on the game-changing tonality ‘Damnation’ brought by way of somewhat goofy progressive rock influences, applying them to a maudlin style of dark metal. ‘The Many Sides of Truth‘ (2014) was a return to form in some respects though it doesn’t feel like a progression in hindsight, especially as the ‘simpler’ deployment of ‘Cold Dead Lands’ finds much greater impact.

“Picking Up the Pieces” is the great motivator for this write-up and countless repeated spins of ‘Cold Dead Lands’ that’d result as it serves the sweetest fission of 90’s British doom metal weight (via ‘New Dark Age’) and Grey Skies Fallen‘s own narrative turn. The epic heavy metal intro with its inspired lead-in isn’t the first air guitar moment on the album but provides some foreshadowing for the intense hooks that come a bit later in the 11+ minute song. The trio really shine on these extra-extended pieces, showcasing some great appreciation for classic heavy metal’s penchant for ear-grabbing introductory statements and an understanding of how well they play in a live setting. The epiphany of the “Just let it burn / and build upon its ruins / Its finally my turn / I should have done this long ago” verse is brilliant and the hook that follows (around the 6 minute mark) would serve as a pair of well-deserved cement shoes, plunging me right in the thick of the imagery the album had been building up to that point. A fine moment that’d appreciate in value as I’d spin the album with increasing frequency.

Grey Skies Fallen had always been the exact sort of band you’d want Dan Swanö involved in, especially back in the early 2000’s, and the band have remarked they’d been wanting his innate extreme doom metal sensibilities applied since about that time. Self-financed, self-produced, self-released, and not opting for full-on crowd funding beyond the last record the band have not only finally managed to get that mix/master from him but they’ve written the exact right record for the job. Of course due credit to their long developed relationship with Keith Moore at Audio Playground for the recording itself, anyone hitting the knobs for this thing did right by the material. So, what’d be the downside to the listening experience, then? Minor notes mostly, as I’d found “After the Summer Comes the Fall” long-winded and could’ve been slashed down to about 7-8 minutes with much the same impact. It still flows beautifully back into the opener so, no real harm done. As I’d suggested prior, this is (for my taste) the finest release from Grey Skies Fallen to date both in terms of their sound sans keyboardist and the stellar quality of its recording and production values. ‘Cold Dead Lands’ comes with a very high recommendation, particularly for the moderately sentimental melodic death/doom fan attuned to the sharper side of classic epic doom metal.

Attribution: https://grizzlybutts.com/2020/01/20/grey-skies-fallen-cold-dead-lands-2020-review/