It was back in 2020 that I reviewed a pair of great E.P.s from Cork, Ireland’s “The Grief”, at which point I gave them a collected 8.5 out of 10. Well, it’s three years later and the lads from the Emerald Isle are back with nine tracks of fresh music. Three years has felt like a long time to me – let’s face it, it’s been a pretty eventful period in our recent history. Has time moved on for The Grief too?
Well, yes and no is the rather inconclusive answer. This is indisputably the same band that produced the excellent “Ascent” and “Descent” E.P.s, (which were collected together in 2021 as “Horizon’s Fall”) but the music this time is a little more developed and – dare I say it – thoughtful. In the accompanying promo sheet, the band reveal how ““We’ve chosen to challenge ourselves & the listener on this album with a few longer songs, and wanted to keep the tracks on Crucible engaging for the listener at the same time”. Well, as opener “The Forging” emerged from the speakers, I was really put to mind a fairly unexpected influence. Of course, there’s a whole dollop of melancholic melodic doom here, but the vocals and intricacies of the lead guitars kept bringing Solitude Aeturnus to mind.
For the most part, “Crucible” is an album that trades in mid-paced slowness, with some particular highlights in both the selection of the fragile yet addictive guitar melodies, and the soaring vocals, backed up with an impressively tight rhythm section. There’s some hefty history and experience among the band members, and it’s clear that this is first and foremost the kind of album that the band themselves would want to listen to. It also stretches its wings a bit wider than the usual influences for similar bands, – you know, the Paradise Lost / My Dying Bride / Katatonia copy-cats in the scene – and instead has many more influences expected and less expected. Whether they know it or not, I was occasionally put to mind of System of a Down (!) in the way in which some of the vocals played at parts, such as with “Disenthrall”.
Other tracks, such as the storming “The Architect” possess a little more grit, with some axe riffs so crunchy they’d make Walkers Crisps blush. It’s here we also hear the growled vocals clearly, which to me are a less accented version of The Meads of Asphodel’s Metatron in terms of tone and timbre. Now, ordinarily the interplay between clean and growled vocals can – and this is a connoisseur’s term “get right on my tits”, but The Grief get things bang-on. With riffs that would make Greg Mackintosh feel “a bit gloomy”, they are a band that knows how to get their doom on; however, “Crucible” isn’t just one flavour. Yes, a lot of it is miserable (this is doom after all), but it’s all done with a flair and inventiveness that marks them out from a lot of the pack. It’s doom all right, but it’s done in a way that has somewhat more of an open mind for new ideas.
In terms of production – once again it’s recorded at John Murphy (guitars) “Barn” studio, and goes to show that with the right equipment and know-how, it’s entirely possible to record an album that sounds as if it was made by a major-label artist. It’s been mastered this time by Marco Tervonen (The Crown), which probably explains why the sound is so damned punchy when it needs to be.
Good stuff, and well worth your time if you’re in the market for melodic, accomplished and inventive misery.
(8.5/10 Chris Davison)
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