There’s always been a low-fi fringe to the funeral doom fraternity – and metal in general, I suppose – and it’s easy to forget the appeal of that in these days of digital perfection. What’s more the possibilities of the genre have been mushrooming out from the crevices of gothic mildew which have been the traditional haunts of these doomsters of glacial pace and exploiting long overlooked possibilities. In short the funeral doom bar has been raised very high which makes it all the more jarring when you hear something that isn’t perfect. But some imperfections – and there are a few in this debut by Chalice of Suffering – can sometimes help to highlight the triumphs. Perhaps it’s just me, or perhaps it’s a metal thing, but I often can’t help liking something despite its faults – and in this case even because of some of those hackneyed lyrics and drab spoken word sections.
Not that For You I Die is strictly lo-fi but let’s just say the gradient between what’s good about it and what’s more challenging may well be steeper than most releases. But I sure as hell would like something that at times sounds charmingly amateurish and then thunderingly addictive at others than the vast army of copycats and averageness that currently spews forth from the digital ‘super’ highway. Opener Darkness provides the album with a slightly pedestrian start and second track suffers from the curse of the spoken word vocal (imagine verve and nasal delivery of Kevin Arnold’s friend Paul from cringy 1980s snore-fest The Wonder Years) complete with some cheeseball lyrics. But even by then the hooks that Chalice of Suffering can offer are beginning to settle like an ill-timed but determined snowfall.
It’s the mid-album tracks like Who Will Cry that begin to get right under your skin with their gloomy melodies and morose, plodding repetition – things that would normally be criticisms if you were talking about, say, thrash metal but which are unquestionably positive when it comes to funeral doom. By then you get the feeling these guys have something and may just have misfired the delivery here and there. By the fourth track the addictive melodies are in full swing, the vocals are beginning to blister like a smelting furnace and there is a very cool tremolo guitar delivery just after the halfway point that makes you wish you could just hand the release back and ask them to try a bit harder on the first two tracks. The bag-pipe track I really like – if only it had been spliced with some heavy guitar I think it would have blown my bloody head off by this point – and the poetic Irish verse of the penultimate track combined with an interesting flattened riff provides a decent diversion from the usual funeral doom formula.
For completeness sake the final track ain’t bad either so what we have here is an album that I could actually get into if my pea sized stegosaurus brain can get over a few of the obvious faults. Definitely worth the plunge if funeral doom is your thing and you may actually find you have a bit of an unpolished gem after a few listens. But I can’t help feeling the band has made this harder than it needed to be.
(7/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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