The Weight of Oceans

Prog is a genre that I often steer clear of, simply because everything seems too long-winded and it often appears to me that the band spend huge amounts of unnecessary time building up to exactly what the listener has been after from the start. In Mourning fall into the same trap, as while the climax is always incredible, there are always too many minutes of simplistic chugging without much happening before things get there. At times they do pull it off, like the opener 'Colossus', where everything works well to make it build up to the chorus every time it goes through a verse. But it doesn't always happen like that for the duration of The Weight of Oceans.

Besides the songs being overly long and often spending too long building up, there isn't really anything I can complain about. The drumming is tight and solid, and even if not always spectacular it does support the rest of the band well. The doom metal vibe that this album has probably explains the lack of spectacular moments, and the often slow pace may be the reason for this. The vocals are quite varied as far as growls go, from a low thunder that would impress even Johan Hegg to a higher sort of shriek that normally would be an ear-sore, but don't really bother me here. There are also some cleans in there, courtesy of Celestial Tear, which are not bad but equally nothing spectacular.

The solid work from those two parts of the band though are pretty much forgotten when the guitar work comes into effect. Granted, it takes its time unlike the other parts, and we're forced to listen through a whole load of generic chugs and slow, doomy riffs in order to get to the point that we're actually interested in, but the thing is that we know the climax is going to be that good that we are willing to put up with the mediocre parts. There is a very melancholic feeling that the guitar work oozes, and it's done so well that it hooked me right from the start. Perhaps the band are fortunate that I stuck with them long enough to hear what they really have to offer, but they do have a talent for crafting emotional songs like no one else I've ever heard when they actually get going.

The thing that really stops this album from becoming an all-time great is that the songs all stick around too long. They aren't a band that can make such long songs so intricate and alluring for their entire duration, and when you've only got eight songs and a short instrumental, an hour's run-time is extremely long and drawn-out. In Mourning are clearly capable of producing the goods and they can make very simple riffing patterns sound like something so much more than that, but it should also be noted that maybe only half of this album actually comprises of them doing so. If only the sections of needless chugging that add nothing were removed, this album would be drastically better.