Greetings from Hell

As a Dutch band active in the early 1990s, Mourning probably had a shot at becoming something big in the death doom world, but eventually they faded after releasing just one full-length. It seems fitting that Terror from Hell Records are giving Greetings from Hell another chance, since surely label and album dwell in the same regions. The extent of the re-release gives the 30 year old recording a remaster, new packaging on the CD, and 5 additional songs for fans to savour. Admittedly, the bonus tracks leave a little to be desired compared to the original 46 minute album, what with one of them being a kind of sequel to ‘Get AIDS and Die’ and the rest mainly focusing on the punkier side of Mourning’s unusual approach.

Indeed, it was always difficult to place the trio (2 of whom have passed away in the last decade) among the death doom movement of their time, since they sound like hateful underground death metal zombies, sort of like if Nihilist had heard Winter early in their career and never identified a signature guitar tone. The dual pacing of Greetings from Hell reflects the situation that Asphyx passed through in their formative years, though the warbling bass and strong mids sound of the guitar give Mourning both a sinister menace at slow speeds and a ragged energy at faster moments. A snarling, anti-social delivery makes lyrics like “What you smell is the smell of my shit…This is my territory, so piss off you fools” carry the same energy as the instrumentals.

Effectively, Mourning just uses doom as a means to make their music sound difficult and desolate, thinning out the sound for slow chord progressions early in 'Sweet Dreams' before motoring into more comfortable tremolo riffs and double bass. Given that they modulate that into punky chords and groovier manifestations of the same riff for the following 'Death's Dance', it's easy to understand that nothing really stays fixed, with each song also being broken into many small sections with awkward shifts in pace and feel between them, only united by the disturbing sonic settings. That makes a listen to Mourning a unique experience, but not terribly enjoyable. Even a timely reissue like this may not be enough to validate classic status for Greetings from Hell, though it may just attract another few thousand Hellhammer followers to check this out.


Originally written in edited form for Metalegion #13 - www.metalegion.com

The first and only release from South Holland based death/doom band Mourning is a surprisingly overlooked classic sub-genre defining release that exemplifies an equal ratio of death metal and traditional doom metal influences. Formed in 1989 with the drummer from Sempiternal Deathreign (and later Eternal Solstice) these guys are one of the earlier examples of successful application of death metal aesthetics and production within and album made up entirely of decidedly gloomy doom metal songs. Though it isn’t all plodding riffs and nihilistic sourness, most of it is pure filth and depravity cut from doom metals most depressed sonic cloth.

‘Greetings From Hell’ combines the gritty, buzzing death metal thud of Winter‘s ‘Into Darkness’ and the raving thrashing-mad doom of Dream Death‘s ‘Journey Into Mystery’ with a touch of ‘The Road Less Travelled’ bleakness. You won’t find a big Swedish guitar tone but rather a fuzzed-out crunch that isn’t too far from Revelation‘s stoned ambitions on ‘Salvation’s Answer’. There are touches of Celtic Frost inspired riffing here and there but most of it seems in service to early Penance style doom metal grooves and shouted bitter vocals. Most of the guitar work beyond ‘Greetings From Hell’ centers around rhythmic churn-and-chugging riffs while the lead guitar work is subtle and generally more evocative of doom metal’s simpler blues-free moments of the earl 90’s.

While the album starts off with a strong doom metal lean and some huge riffs on the opener and “Sweet Dreams”, a lot of the best songs start closer to the end of the tracklist. “What?” has an ancient Saint Vitus vibe to it and “Deranged or Dead” resembles Rouwen‘s hurried Hellhammer-ish death metal before they’d formed the idea. And of course how could I review this album and not mention their death/doom opus “Get AIDS and Die” which offers angst and bitterness alongside bursts of ‘Leprosy’ and Obituary style kicks of death metal. While it isn’t the most varied set of songs in the long storied history of death/doom but it does offer a great mix of old school death metal orthodoxy as well as absolutely banging doom metal riffs, often mixing both styles within their longer songs.

The band wouldn’t do much after this release. After splitting up in 1997 some members formed Rouwen and released a decent primitive death metal EP ‘Rouwkots’ that seemed to have nu metal/groove metal ambitions. The CD isn’t impossible to find and the vinyl reissue sounds great, but it is a shame this never got a decent CD reissue with Rouwen‘s EP and the demos tacked on. An essential release for fans of old school death/doom and collectors of obscure doom metal releases.

Attribution: grizzlybutts.com/2018/02/20/retro-tuesdays-mourning-greetings-from-hell-1993/

I can only imagine that a lack of availability through the years has crippled Greetings from Hell in terms of its underground popularity, because it thrives at that classic death/doom style whose audience readily devours just about anything retro they can get their soggy paws on. Hell, these people have even made a cult classic out of Winter's Into Darkness, an album upon which the only praise words I could heap are 'crushing' and 'seminal', because otherwise it's so void of interesting riffs and ideas that I might rather listen to a radiator buzz if given the choice. No, Mourning has a sound here that ought to fit right in with the contemporary worship of atmospheric extreme metal, so as I sit drowning in detestable, 95° F summery 'bliss', why the fuck not dust this beast off and have at it?

The Dutch actually had quite a number of gems in this mold, and some of you might be familiar with records like Delirium's Zzooouhh or Sempiternal Deathreign's The Spooky Gloom, both of which were quite impressive and influential upon a lot of European death/doom cults to follow, and both better and more eerily atmospheric than Greetings from Hell. However, Mourning could very much be lumped into that same company, because if nothing else, this is some truly bleak shit, the endless field of skulls and bones on the cover fairly indicative of the 46 minutes of audio. These aren't friendly sounds, and you wouldn't use them to stimulate growth in that garden you've been tending. Dreary, apocryphal, and nearly droning in some of the sparser riffing sequences where the percussion largely cuts out ("Demon's Dance"), it's best defined as a gray waste of steady rhythmic suffering from which there is no salvation until the panned snarls that close out the optimistic finale "Get AIDs and Die".

But, shockingly, Greetings from Hell is not boring in the slightest, since it earnestly augments the brooding doom stretches with intermittent spurts of fuzzed out Floridian antiquity, loose tremolo picked guitars that attempt to recapture the morbid feel of Scream Bloody Gore, Slowly We Rot, The Spooky Gloom and so forth. There's also a massive Hellhammer influence here, not only through the murky, obvious guitar tone but also in how they put together chord patterns to create that same cryptic stench the Swiss invented on their demos; and the occasional, gruff 'hwah' dished out by bassist/vocalist Marc van Amelsfoort. There's also a pretty cut 'n' dry foundation of slow or mid-paced thrash metal here, as if someone took a few riffs from that period and then just slathered them with oozing distortion and despair and turned on the tape reel to witness their translation into a more sluggish, disgusting mutation.

Speaking of van Amelsfoot, he's normally delivering a blunt bark that churns against the rhythm guitar with a fraction of reverb and resonance, very fitting to the aesthetic pessimism of the music. As with many records of this type, placement of lyric lines isn't exactly rocket science: you choke out a syllable or two here or there, and let it cut into the meat of the riffing like an axe felling a tree. The result is that, apart from their inherent sense of enmity and depression, the vocals aren't really all that compelling beyond their base functionality. Fortunately, he's got a nice, saucy, distorted bass tone here that helps flood the basement of the trio's sound, appropriately slimy when everything else cuts out in a song like "Territorial" or the intro to "Deranged or Dead", and fully audible even where it closely follows the guitar progression. Drums are actually the clearest component on the record, standing out even where everything else blends together in the distance. Loud fills, and stock but measured rock beats during the slower material, but not exactly utopia of you're seeking lots of double bass or anything faster than a half-blast tempo.

The tremolo riffs here in tunes like "Sweet Dreams" actually accounted for most of my favorite moments, reeking of genuine negativity and filth even across the span of two decades, but even by 1993 I can't cite them as having a lot of novelty. Clearly Greetings from Hell was second generational in most of its ideas, but what it does well is balance the two parent genres, never overly committing to one or the other. They also keep most of the tracks down to a reasonable length..."Arma Satani" and "Only War and Hell" are voluptuous at 7 and 8 minutes, but both have similar contrasts in pacing that the listener can easily survive them. At no point does Mourning fall back on endlessly repetitive funeral doom riffing cycles, and they toss in enough vibrant if sloppy leads that the album doesn't lose a sense of kinetic energy despite the topical negativity. It's about as 'well rounded' as you could hope for considering its thematic choices, but you will definitely feel doomed. Humanity is fucked, and Mourning was doing its part to usher us along.

Not a great debut by any means, but solid and engaging enough to have built a more interesting future upon. Instead, the band changed its name to Rouwen and dropped an EP in 1997 that I haven't heard, presumably with a minor shift in style. So Greetings from Hell must stand alone, if not 'standing out' among the relatively crowded death/doom scene at the front half of the 90s, where English bands were making large strides past everyone else in recognition. Apart from the solemn pacing and soul-sucking negativity, though, I feel like this is not entirely comparable to old Paradise Lost, Anathema, or My Dying Bride. Definitely more for the Hellhammer crowd, or followers of the seminal US groups Winter and Grief. I'm not into the Japanese band Gallhammer whatsoever, but if you're down with that sound you'd also find some common ground with Mourning. Track it down, pass it around; it might even be time for a fancy limited repressing on vinyl (assuming it hasn't happened already), since these authentic 90s obscurities are all the rage right now, at least among a small population in the metal underground. I know that Vic Records reissued their 1992 split with another Dutch doom/death unknown, Eternal Solstice, and that's pretty good, so who knows!?

-autothrall
http://www.fromthedustreturned.com