As I suspect is the case for most people, one of my favourite things about music – including the myriad types of metal – is its ability to pick you up and put you down in a very specific place and/or time. Fear of the Dark (especially the many live versions) will always take me back to Download 2007, Nancy Boy takes me back to January 1997, and having my 11-year-old teenybopper eyes opened by Brian Molko on Top of the Pops, and so on and so forth. I have a lot of them, you might have more, you might have fewer, but the point is we’ve all got musical touchstones of one sort or another. My personal favourites are the musical portkeys that, rather than recalling a particular gig or period of your life, whisk you away to somewhere you want to be. I suppose in theory that could be somewhere you’ve already been, but whether it is or not, the key here is escapism. Which is exactly the word I’d pick if I had to sum up The River in one word. In the same way that Alcest are so good at magicking you away to glistening crystalline forests, with something magical and unknowable just ever so slightly out of reach, The River are here to take you someplace else.

Now you might think Alcest are an obvious comparison here, and in terms of the overall aim of the music they are indeed, but there’s actually surprisingly little in common here musically, other than a shared approach to metal that can be described as “post-[blank]”. Where Alcest are glittering, roaring post-black that alternates stargazing in the trees with howling into the (very pretty) void, The River are dense, shimmering post-doom, with delicate female vocals picking their way over the top like a pixie on a tiny footpath.

The album kicks off (in the gentlest sense possible) with Fading, which is incredibly pretty and delicate, but honestly at this point I’m struggling to see where the doom (post or otherwise) comes into the equation. Like the Lumsk album I reviewed a while back, this track inhabits the fuzzy territory of neofolk as peddled by Tenhi and other bands of that ilk, although it is lacking the darker, unsettling depths of Tenhi’s latest offering (also released recently, reviewed elsewhere on Ave Noctum). Moving on to Exits, the doom slides into view, and provides a heavy, impenetrable backdrop to the melodies and vocals flitting over the top, a theme that will continue across the rest of the album. Tiny Ticking Clocks is easily the best example of this so far, with a heavy tick-tock sound plodding away at the back that is almost funereal – the opacity of this track is actually quite impressive given how little is actually going on for most of it. It somehow shouldn’t be as rich and heavy as it is, and the effect is very much more than the sum of its parts. Each “tick” of the clock expands and reverbs until it melts into the next, and there’s some suitably mournful strings weaving their way through, and both come together to frame the vocals perfectly.

The transition into A Vignette is, frankly, worthy of attention in and of itself. The doom clock that’s been tocking away for most of Tiny Ticking Clocks quietly develops a twin cymbal rhythm as the track changes, and proceeds for just over a minute until the next track starts to unfold. Then the ticking subtly shifts to a more syncopated beat, and suddenly you’re in the middle of A Vignette, which doesn’t so much start after the previous track ends, as quietly grow out of it – there’s the slightest fade in and out of the sound you move from one track to the next, but otherwise these two tracks flow into each other like a single entity. And yes, both tracks are pretty similar, but when an album flows as well as this one, I can forgive a lot of that, especially when the sound in question is this gorgeous. If it ain’t broke and all that.

The final track, Hollowful, takes us back to the gentle folk that we started out with, and much as I have enjoyed the rest of this album, this is a strong contender for my favourite track. It’s diaphanous and slightly spindly, fragile folk, with a slow, ponderous pace that not only takes you places, but makes you dawdle and appreciate those places properly. I once “watched” Maybeshewill in a shoebox at Damnation Festival, sitting with some old mates in a corner at the back, eyes closed, and drifted off while they did their thing at the front of the room, unseen by all but the front few rows. It’s one of my favourite little gig memories, and Hollowful makes me want to “watch” The River in much the same circumstances.

So, to cut an even longer story short, this album is gorgeous. If you like dreamy, escapist post-whatever, this album is an opportunity to spend 40 minutes letting your mind go wherever the wind takes it, and it’s beautifully done. The doom is in there, but don’t be put off by it if doom isn’t your thing – this is first and foremost post, with some doomy elements. Likewise, if you’re coming at this from the doom side rather than the post side, how well you get on with this depends more on how you feel about post and folk, rather than doom itself. A Hollow Full of Hope many things, but a straight doom album is it not. If you like the more folky, pastoral, acoustic and/or posty end of doom however, this is probably right up your alley.

I do have a (minor) gripe with some of it, in that the lyrics are trying a bit too hard to be profound/evocative in places (I may never work out why there were spiders on speakers, or why The River felt the need to tell me about it), and I feel like parts of this album might work better if the focus were on the sound made by Jenny Newton’s lovely voice, rather than the words themselves. Like the sort of post-rock/metal where the vocals are there for effect rather than purely to convey the lyrics, or even Karl Jenkins’ Adiemus, where the human voice is used purely as an instrument, and the “words” don’t actually mean anything. That’s not to say I don’t like the vocals – I do, but I feel like the gauzy, ethereal atmosphere created here would be just that little bit more powerful with a slight change of focus.

That one minor gripe aside, this is still a superb album that I suspect a lot of people will find something to love in, albeit possibly for different reasons. Whether you listen to Hollow Full of Hope because you love doom, post, atmospheric metal in general, or even just good old pastoral flavoured folk, there’s plenty to enjoy here. In fact, the single biggest compliment I can give this album is that after a couple of listens, I found myself actually not wanting to review it. Not in any negative way, but in the sense that reviewing invariably means analysing and getting beneath the skin of an album, and I didn’t really want to here – I just wanted to listen to it, and enjoy Hollow Full of Hope for what it is, which is an excellent post-doom album.

(9/10 Ellie)

https://www.facebook.com/riverbanduk

https://riverbanduk.bandcamp.com/album/a-hollow-full-of-hope