‘Returning to the Primary Source’ is Graveflower’s first release, although it feels oddly like some overlooked and long out-of print relic, plucked from obscurity from some lofty shelf after years of gathering dust. This turns out to be at least partly true, as the band have in fact been writing and performing for a good decade, but before now have only ever appeared hidden away on the occasional Solitude compilation disc.
It’s not clear exactly how old the tracks on the album are, but whenever they were written, it was with the halcyon days of miserable doom-death firmly in mind. The press release cites My Dying Bride’s ‘Like Gods of the Sun’ as a primary influence, and indeed there are elements of that album’s slick and brooding fragility at work here and there, but by far the strongest resemblance is to the unforgivingly bleak and sprawling entropy of Turn Loose the Swans. ‘My Turn’ for example drags itself along deliriously and seemingly without end, its mournful melodies repeatedly peaking with sudden sharp harmonic stabs hurled skyward, building up and tumbling back down in futile fashion to the accompaniment of some decidedly Stainthorpian wounded laments. It’s derivative, certainly, and pretty formulaic, but as an exercise in imitation it excels; the guitars have that same otherworldly tone and utterly drained pace, whilst the clean vocals are strong enough here (and elsewhere) to convince that they could actually be Aaron himself doing a guest spot on the album.
‘The Falling Leaves’ sounds similarly familiar, lurching constantly from dirgy lethargy to sudden fleeting melodic bursts, again evoking classic MDB, but insists on breaking character with a relatively upbeat up-tempo doom-death groove and bouncing trad-doom chug. And like so much of the album it doesn’t really work. Individual moments of the album can be striking, but other parts feel entirely mundane, whilst the incongruent shifts in style and mood ultimately give everything a taped-together feel. The album doesn’t feel like a cohesive whole, and given that there is anything up to ten years worth of material condensed onto the disc, perhaps it might be better viewed as a retrospective compilation than as an album proper. ‘Rain in Inferno’ for example feels completely removed from the tracks descibed above. It’s still loosely gothic doom, but of a very different kind; a warm and pastoral track crowned with some full-throated and soaring clean vocals with an ethnic, eastern folk quality to them. It’s not bad, but it sits ill at ease alongside slabs of harmonic-squeal-racked dirges and Byronesque despair.
‘Autumn Within’ is full of similarly accented vocals, this time sombre and subdued and built around powerfully gloomy, slow-burning melodic riffs that Mourning Beloveth, or indeed Solitude labelmates Ophis, would likely be proud of. But its just a snippet at the end of the album- another indication of where the band could go if they could actually settle on one direction. Add in some perfectly nice clean-picked instrumental interludes and we’re about done. There is talent and experience here, but it’s marred by confusion of identity and uneven songwriting. Hopefully a more focussed follow-up will show what these guys are really capable of.
(5.5/10 Erich Zann)
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