Hello, and welcome to Part 2 of Out of my Wheelhouse, where I review new albums in genres I know little to nothing about. Today we have an atmospheric doom death album from Rise to The Sky, and while I know what each of those things is in isolation, I don’t actually really know what I’ve let myself in for with an album that is all three. Atmospheric I’m fine with, seen Alcest more times than I can count etc etc, death is generally not my thing, but I know it when I hear it, and I can generally make a decent fist of distinguishing the good, the bad and the ugly. Doom is another story. It’s one of those genres that I’ve encountered enough times in passing (and often liked what I’ve heard) that I really should have dipped a toe into the genre as a whole before now. But I haven’t, and therefore I come to this review with precious little beyond the vague knowledge that I’d probably like My Dying Bride more than I think I do if I actually listened to them more often, and I that enjoy a bit of Bell Witch/Stygian Bough but couldn’t eat a whole one.
(Also, fun fact: I have my next album to review ready and waiting, and it’s about as far from being out of my wheelhouse as is strictly possible short of literally being Omnikoloss. It’s basically my comfort zone in album form.)
So, Rise to The Sky. The atmospheric, doomy, deathy brainchild of Sergio González Catalán, born out of his hometown of Santiago, Chile. He’s joined on this album by Emidio Alexandre Ramos on drums, and guest vocals are provided by Natalia Deprina, but this is Catalán’s baby through and through. It’s an intensely personal project, and those who prefer their metal to be raw, intimate, and straight from under the skin of its creator, I cannot stress enough how much this album is for you. That said, if you’ve recently (whatever recently means for you) had a bereavement, this may not be the album for you right now. The two years of grief referred to in the title is very much not metaphorical.
The opening track, Funeral For My Home, starts out in a somewhat unexpected fashion, with a gorgeous passage of piano and strings that feels like it should absolutely slip into the first movement of Beethoven’s Pathétique before too long. Which is fitting regarding the grave tempo notation, but unlike Pathétique what follows is anything but allegro di molto e con brio. Instead, the delicate strings give way to what I can only describe as a crushing, crashing wave of, well, doom. More commanding opening to the third movement of the Appassionata than the Pathétique, if you will. Catalán lays down a deceptively gentle opening, before coming down on you like a ton of bricks, which is all the more powerful because you know it’s coming, and the anticipation is part of the effect. It’s like the magnificent transition point on Cruelty and the Beast, where the unsettling scene-setting of Once Upon Atrocity gives way to the ferocity of Thirteen Autumns and a Widow, which comes at you full blast, like a writhing tsunami of sound after 1.45 mins of eerie chanting and soundscaping.
Two Years of Grief starts out in much the same way, except this time it’s a surging behemoth of deathy guitars, struggling and heaving against its own weight. The doom is still there, in the lumbering, weighty melody that provides distant light in the darkness, and pulls the track along to its emotional climax, which is dense and complex enough that it brings to mind the blistering sludge of bands like Astrohenge. This pattern of gentle, pretty intros that are inevitably shattered by a wall of sound continues for the next few tracks, and there isn’t any real variety until track five, Two Years of Grief, which starts with the soft patter of rain, before opening out into a pretty little track of female vocals over a rich background of interwoven sound that represents a turning point in the album. Can’t Hide from Pain takes this and melds it with the earlier heavy, overwhelming sound to create something that although similar to the first four tracks, is actually less dense, more hopeful and less suffocating. The doom is still there, but there’s a very different vibe also in play now. By the time we get to the big epic of the album, From My Blood I Bring You Home, it’s clear the mood has changed significantly. This is a big (14.35 mins) emotional extravaganza of musical catharsis, as the stifling doom of the beginning makes way for something entirely more hopeful and uplifting. The final track, My Light Dies, despite the title, is actually a pretty heartening number that has more in common with Souvenirs D’un Autre Monde-era Alcest than any of its predecessors on Two Years of Grief.
If you’ve divined from the above paragraph that this album is a journey, both musically and emotionally, then well done! Have a coconut, or whatever small token of success you fancy. The key to this album is in the story behind it: Catalán’s last three albums (Per Aspera Ad Astra; Every Day, A Funeral; Stay With Me When You’re Gone) have primarily been about the passing of his father, and the all-consuming and long-lingering grief he dealt with at the time, and still does. Two Years of Grief is the culmination of that series of albums, but not in the expected way: two years after his father’s death, Catalán welcomed a son into the world, and feels that becoming a father himself has, in some ways, brought his own father back to him. So, where the previous three albums were explorations of the nature of grief and bereavement, Two Years of Grief is the point where the clouds have begun to shift, as the griever enters a new phase of his life and has an entire new life to focus on.
Full disclosure here, my charming old sod of a dad died in 2012, and I’m actually writing this the day after his anniversary, which also happens to be just before Father’s Day, and what would have been his 78th birthday next week. (He was nothing if not efficient, dying so close to the two other milestones.) So this album pushes a lot of buttons, and possibly more than anyone other than Catalán himself, I absolutely get the catharsis that’s present in this album. The early tracks are a frankly superb aural metaphor for the nature and experience of grief, from the soft interludes where you think you’re ok, only for it to hit you out of nowhere like an overwhelming wave of doom riffs, to the repetitive nature of those early tracks, to the sheer weight of the sound, and the way it suffocates, stifles, and blocks out the sun. It’s like a thick, choking fog that descends at a moment’s notice and cuts you off from everyone and everything.
But then, chinks of light. Blurry lights in the distance that slowly get closer, clearly, bigger. Suddenly you find yourself laughing at something, and while the fog comes back the minute you realise, it doesn’t stick around as long as last time. You gradually reconnect with the world and people around you, and the waves of grief become smaller, less frequent, and they don’t drown you in the way they once did. That’s the journey Catalán takes you on here. The grief never truly goes away, and even in the relatively light, playful tones of My Light Dies, the heaviness is still there, but in the background. It’s not the story of coming through loss and the hurt going away, it’s the story of learning to live with it.
Ultimately, how you approach, experience, and end up feeling about this album will for the most part depend on how willing and able you are to engage with the emotional journey involved. I mean technically you can just enjoy it as a doomy death album, and I’ve no doubt some people will, but the story being told adds so many layers to the music and the experience as a whole, that I recommend delving into it, even if you’re lucky enough that you can’t relate to the events and emotions involved. In fact, possibly even more so if you can’t relate, because this album is a spectacular metaphor for the kind of grief that feels like it’s ending your world, and the process of slowly coming out the other end. I’ve tried to explain this shit before, to people who’ve never lost someone like a parent, and words only get you so far anyway to be quite honest.
So that’s Two Years of Grief, in all its raw emotional glory. It’s a funny one to give a score to, because I can’t honestly say I really enjoyed listening to this album (although I enjoyed the doomy bits far more than I expected), and realistically it’ll probably be a long time before I put myself through this again. However I do also have to concede that actually I feel better for having listened to it, and gone on Catalán’s journey with him. Whether or not you want to or should, is up to you, and depends on all sorts of factors that I’m not going to get into here. Just be warned that it’s heavy as hell, both musically and emotionally.
(9/10 Ellie)
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