Now on their fourth album, Belgian progressive stoner rock band My Diligence have stayed with the same line-up since coming together in 2015. The latest album “Death.Horses.Black” is described as a blend of genres, including post-metal, psych-metal, doom and shoegaze. The double guitar attack guarantees a big sound.

“Death” hits us first. The sound is expansive and shadowy. The vocals echo. This most definitely has a progressive metal edge to it. “Death” ranges from moody to harsh, with the vocalist emitting a ferocious scream from time to time. But overall there’s an Opeth-type progression, and a crunchy sound. It all knits together very well. “Horses” is like a steady instrumental march with the vocals again alternating between a plaintive style and the occasional roar. The music rises into reflective post-metal territory, transforming into heavy stoner and pushing back into a wider pleading expanse. I can tell that My Diligence have lots of musical ideas. As a listener I was struggling to make sense of all the switching between heavy, emotional, dark, haunting and violent moods and whatever else. It’s like mental instability.

I’m not sure what all that had to do with horses but we were now on “Black”. A twisty rhythm stands behind a solid riff. The guitars growl. The vocalist appeals upwards. The mood changes suddenly to one of disturbance before pumping forward into stoner and psychedelic vibes. I really didn’t know where I stood with all of this, as we lurch without rhyme or reason from one tableau to the next. I suppose you could call this experimental. The good thing I suppose is that this didn’t sound like anyone else in particular, yet sounds like many. One band I did think of when listening to this was Darkane. “Black” does end with a sustained and powerful bout of stoner, which was welcome, before we move onto “Auspicious”, a slower burn piece of classic metal with a nice guitar line and the by now familiar expansive and distant-sounding vocal. The atmosphere then darkens. The drum pounds. The guitar growls in post-metal fashion before we return to the lighter and airier song. Again it’s a musical piece whose parts are fine but which for me didn’t hang together meaningfully.

A monotonous and hypnotising interlude follows, before the normal mish-mash resumes with “Allodiplogaster Sudhausi”. This gets under way powerfully with a forceful burst of post-metal. A distant and I suppose haunting vocal line intervenes as the music shows down. This idea having apparently been exhausted, there’s a build-up to another quiet refrain before the instrumentalists create black clouds once more, and with come growls. The emotive vocal reappears, as the song takes another loosely post rock path before bursting out of its shell. “Lucid Alley” was anything but lucid, being an amalgam of sounds and styles. The strange thing is that there’s nothing wrong with one particular thing, although I didn’t like the protracted, dreamy vocals and felt that they didn’t fit into the hybrid and neutralising atmosphere of this album. The final song is “Sacred Anchor”, which starts with a welcome burst of energy. But once again the atmosphere changes and the momentum is lost as My Diligence take us along another path of “guess what comes next”. Some of it is ok, especially the heavy and solid parts, and I will single out the drummer for praise throughout this album, but structurally this was messing up my head.

There was too much going on here to be coherent. Just as “Death.Horses.Black” seems to be an oxymoron, there were just too many contrasts for me here. As a result I didn’t feel connected to this album, didn’t like the purportedly atmospheric vocals and found no flow or structure. My Diligence lost me with this one, I’m afraid.

(4/10 Andrew Doherty)

https://www.facebook.com/mydiligence

https://listenable-records.bandcamp.com/album/death-horses-black-2