With intricate metallic composition and power/prog tendencies, While Heaven Wept’s third album, Vast Oceans Lacrymose (Cruz Del Sur), blends the high drama of European doom à la Paradise Lost with the technical savvy of American prog acts like Dream Theater. The Dale City, Virginia, six-piece (that’s two trios!), led by chief songwriter, guitarist, keyboardist and vocalist Tom Phillips, weave practically a whole album into 15-minute opening track, “The Furthest Shore,” which sets a tone of conflict and triumph for the rest of Vast Oceans Lacrymose to follow.

Harmonies abound on keyboards, guitars and vocals, with Phillips, lead vocalist Rain Irving and keyboardist Michelle Schrotz all contributing. Of course, as a double-guitar unit with a singer and keymaster, there is plenty of room for such things, provided the players are talented to pull it off, which in the case of While Heaven Wept, they are. One imagines that it’s Phillips’ role as main songwriter that keeps things together – difficult as it is to get five people other than yourself on the same page about anything (try it sometime if you never have) – but that’s conjecture on my part that only seems to make sense because of the complexity of the material, the amount of changes in the songs and the carefully hewn theater of a song like “Vessel.” In the context of many other albums, it might just be power metal, but While Heaven Wept keep too progressive a mindset for such simple labeling.

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