MotusTWhile this may be my first experience of Italian doomsters Motus Tenebrae, they’ve been together since 2001, a miserabilist five piece that have released an impressive four full length albums prior to this slab of grief.

Look, before we get down to the review proper, there’s something we have to talk about. This may save you some time. Your enjoyment of this album is going to be directly proportionate to the extent to which you enjoy Paradise Lost.

While it is true to say that there are a plethora of different influences to be hard on this album, anyone with even a passing knowledge of the more downbeat corners of our beloved heavy metal will prick up their ears on hearing the music, perhaps with a slightly upturned Spock-ian eyebrow raise. You see, it’s entirely fair to say that “Deathrising” passes more than a fleeting resemblance to the sonic mastery of Paradise Lost circa “In Requiem”. It wouldn’t be fair to say that they are an exact copy, though certainly to my ears, there are enough parallels to make this more than accidental. Take, for instance, the vocal phrasing of vocalist Luis McFadden on (admittedly excellent) track “Black Sun”. Having been a fan of Nick Holmes for his entire career, the singing is almost an exact simulacra of his pipes. Given that I’ll listen to pretty much anyone with the slightest audio resemblance to Ozzy Osbourne-era Sabbath, I can’t claim that this gave me any cause for concern.

Elsewhere, this is thoroughly meaty, full-fat excursion into the depths of misery. Listening to the album in a single, concentrated sitting with no distractions it’s possible to hear a refinement of the modern, polished be-doomed metal. In particular, the bottom-end grunt of Andreas Das-Cox (bass) and the drums of Andrea Falaschi (drums) underpin the tracks really effectively. On third track, and all-round-stormer “For a Change”, it’s great to hear the band loosen up a little and up the tempo.

Title-track “Death Rising” exemplifies the album’s approach. It begins with a gnarled, appropriately grim guitar tone, before opening up with delicate, minor-key melodies and guitar touches, and an almost-dream like wash of keyboard news. Long-time readers may recall that in general I approach the presence of keyboards in my heavy metal like I approach the presence of Jeremy Clarkson on my tellybox; I know that they appear to be popular, but I just find them irritating. Harvey Cova manages to do a cracking job on the keyboards here, mostly, I think, by being sympathetic to the rest of the music and not drowning everything else out. It’s a mark of the musician that he has been relatively subtle throughout the album in how the keyboard has been deployed.

The production has that modern punch and sheen that we have come to take for granted, though pleasingly, the guitars have had their grit and attack well preserved. Through a decent pair of headphones the whole thing sounds like it has been given a really expensive production, easily sitting shoulder to shoulder with anything produced by the “big name” producers, though as a minor gripe, I would have liked to have heard the guitar melodies pushed slightly louder in the mix, as occasionally I felt they were drowned out by the bottom end.

There’s a lot to enjoy here, and while the Paradise Lost comparisons are too close for comfort at times, they wouldn’t be the first, nor indeed the last band to do a decent job of producing something that they can claim as their own while using that mighty outfit’s blueprint – it certainly hasn’t done any harm for Gothic-era boredom-inducers Katatonia, for instance.  All in, I found myself agreeing that “Deathrising” had done enough to satisfy the “would listen again” test by some margin. An accomplished, if not entirely original, treat.

(7/10 Chris Davison)

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