Description

2016 press on black vinyl with printed innersleeve

After the flower croaked and before the swans could wreck havoc, the sextet pooled their still-striding creative brilliance for yet another ep, one that would mark a slight change in guitar tone from the previous utter crunch to a more fluid, less crotchety caress, retaining only one song’s worth of that special My Dying Bride disconsolate atmosphere that was quickly and oxymoronically gaining momentum. In all respects, there’re really only two songs here. ‘Le Cerf Malade’, a near instrumental with only four verses of French stretched unnoticeably over its lifespan, is a much less stellar, less eventful, and less motivated translation of Frost’s spooky effects tracks ‘Dance Macabre’ and ‘A Tear in a Prophet’s Dream’. Moreover, with its carpet of background moans, distant bells, cryptic quasi-Gregorian chants, keyboards, and other unassimilated cacophony, it’s a precursor to the ambient style worn by the likes of Arcana, Die Verbannten Kinder Evas, and Mz.412 as well as the dungeon chamber music of Mortiis. Of course, MDB didn’t invent these styles by a long shot, but expounded on them in an almost natural assimilation. Unfortunately, it doesn’t exactly form the glue adhering the two real songs. In the vein of the band’s now dependable resonance, the title cut is a slow, groping earthquake of a song. Violin chirps and weaves through plodding rhythmic caverns where Aaron’s demon-spirited barks echo unintelligible warnings to all. With ‘Gather Me Up Forever’, tempos change more regularly, alternating death and doom with bipolar-like range, but with that regularity comes song structuring almost too predictable and one-two, one-two, something possibly keyboards or even horns could’ve broken up. This is the very rare and since long out of print Peaceville EP

Track listing:
1. The Thrash of Naked Limbs
2. Le Cerf Malade
3. Gather Me Up Forever