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My Dying Bride, The Ghost of Orion: Mending Shores

my dying bride the ghost of orion

While it’s true that The Ghost of Orion is My Dying Bride‘s 14th album in a career that hits the 30-year mark in 2020, it’s also their first in a half-decade. That is a longer break between full-lengths than they’ve ever had, and in addition to signing to Nuclear Blast after issuing 2015’s Feel the Misery (review here) and each of its predecessors through Peaceville Records, the distance from one LP to the next might be found in vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe dealing with an illness in his family. More specifically, his child, and even more specifically, his five-year-old daughter got cancer. This is something addressed directly in the material itself, and as the eight-song/58-minute offering passes between the opener “Your Broken Shore” and its brief choral counterpart, the finale “Your Woven Shore,” the theme is writ large throughout, perhaps most directly in “Tired of Tears,” which remains an exceptionally beautiful work of songcraft despite its tragic lyrical origin — it is also equal parts sorrowful and catchy — and a piece like “The Solace,” where Wardruna‘s Linda Fay-Hella steps in on lead vocal joined only by the guitar of Stainthorpe‘s fellow My Dying Bride founder Andrew Craighan. Fay-Hella is one of two guests alongside cellist Jo Quail, and as Lena Abé‘s bass and Jeff Singer‘s drums and Shaun MacGowan‘s keyboards and violins flesh out arrangements, the encompassing whole remains characteristic with the particular style of emotive death-doom that Craighan and Stainthorpe helped pioneer in the band’s landmark early work. The Ghost of Orion, to put it as simply as possible, is the work of masters.

That’s evident from the first strains of guitar and the first thuds of drums that introduce “Your Broken Shore,” and as that track unfolds with its blended death-growl chorus and melodic-vocal verse, its string accompaniment and its unadulterated feeling of rhythmic force, there’s no mistaking My Dying Bride for anyone else among the minimum-two generations of acts they’ve influenced and no doubt will continue to influence, not the least because of the work they do here. As gutturalism and melody come together in the crescendo, “Your Broken Shore” gives way to strings in a fluid transition to the quick keys at the outset of “To Outlive the Gods,” which will return in both the midsection and at the finish, while in between, what plays out is an immersive shift between the leadoff and “Tired of Tears,” of which the immediacy is not at all dulled by the fact that it’s nearly nine minutes long. It is a signature hook for The Ghost of Orion, more so even than “Your Broken Shore,” while and seems very much intended to standout from what surrounds. The fact that it comes situated next to “The Solace” might have something to do with that as well, since that at-least-partial-departure-from-form is also a chance to digest the proceedings up to that point even as they progress through a new stage, but that only adds another level of consideration to how effective The Ghost of Orion is on the whole. Again, the work of masters.

my dying bride

“The Solace” also functions as a transition into the remaining tracks, which take a somewhat different approach than the album up to that point, though perhaps one might look at the structure of “To Outlive the Gods,” with its breaks into clearly-defined sections, as something of a precursor. Positioned as the final cut on side B, “The Solace” itself is stark for its lack of drums and inherently folkish with Fay-Hella‘s vocals standing alone overtop the layers of guitar leads, and what it lends to The Ghost of Orion in terms of atmosphere isn’t out of character certainly with what’s come before, but is definitely built upon in what comes after, as the shape of the second LP moves between the most extreme moments in “The Long Black Land” and the penultimate “The Old Earth” — both of which top 10 minutes long — and the shorter pieces that accompany in the tense but ultimately quiet piano/guitar interlude title-track and the aforementioned closer “Your Woven Shore,” which shifts smoothly in its two-minute stretch between a choir of voices either organic or synthesized and a movement of strings that seems to represent the resolution so much of the album has been begging for — its second half doing so in especially visceral fashion. Though neither wants for overarching lushness or dynamic, they nonetheless represent the darkest reaches of The Ghost of Orion, and even as Stainthorpe self-harmonizes in an especially mournful lower register in the later portion of “The Long Black Hand,” the emotional weight is no less grueling than that of the tone or rhythm surrounding.

Likewise, after “The Ghost of Orion” leaves off its brief passage, the quiet introduction of “The Old Earth,” subtly building to a cymbal-wash-and-stop as the full-thickness riff joins in, the ensuing roll is a setup for the punishment of the record’s harshest, sound-like-they-physically-hurt-to-deliver-in-the-studio growls. Stainthorpe plays back and forth almost in a call and response as “The Old Earth” lumbers through its midsection, and it’s not until after six and a half minutes into the total 10:52 that the tempo picks up to a more kinetic chug. The drums also join that build, and thus drive it, and it seems like My Dying Bride will ride that chug to the song’s finish, but they turn to a more angular section derived from earlier, the strings and guitar continuing to mount tension before finally letting go somewhere just before the final minute begins, Craighan holding on through the last fade from which “Your Woven Shore” emerges to underscore the death-and-life-from-death-and-life thematic that all of The Ghost of Orion has been working through on at least one level for its duration, and usually more than that. Taken individually, its initial salvo feels poised to capture the listener and engage the beginning of the story the band are telling, while everything thereafter answers that by deepening and enriching the plot as it unfurls. An interchange between beauty and pain is not by any means new aesthetic territory for My Dying Bride, and one must allow for the context in such a consideration here perhaps more than one otherwise might, but rarely has their turmoil ever sounded so genuine, and rarely has their triumph through it felt so resonant.

My Dying Bride, “Tired of Tears” lyric video

My Dying Bride, “Your Broken Shore” official video

My Dying Bride website

My Dying Bride on Thee Facebooks

My Dying Bride at Nuclear Blast website

Nuclear Blast on Thee Facebooks

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