You know, it probably should have occurred to me before, but I just didn’t think about it. Ireland‘s Mourning Beloveth first came to my attention after reading an interview a while back, and I never put two and two together (you’d think I’d be used to that by now). Mourning Beloveth — My Dying Bride?? It’s pretty much the same shit.

I was at my favorite NYC shop, Generation Records, and grabbed the 2006 Grau Records reissue of Mourning Beloveth‘s Dust (2001) basically because I was curious. Whether I actively wanted it is up for debate, but times are tough, and if you’re gonna go into a record store — especially a good one — the least you can do is buy something. Maybe that way they won’t all go out of business.

Whenever it was between then and now that I finally put on Dust for the first time, I literally laughed out loud at how much it sounded like My Dying Bride. Hey, I’m all for the melancholic Euro-doom sound, but this was over the top. Mourning Beloveth has put out three records since, including last year’s A Disease for the Ages, so I won’t profess to knowing how they’ve developed over the course of this decade, but it was uncanny. From the woeful progressions to the hyper-dramatized poetry reading vocals, it was The Dreadful Hours all over again.

And then, finally, I got it. Beloveth equals Bride. She’s already dead, so instead of My Dying, you’re already in Mourning. I don’t know if this is clever on the part of the band, or if they did it on purpose, or if they were just hoping no one would pick up on it. All I know is if it was their intent to sound just like My Dying Bride when they started out, they certainly accomplished that. And even though Mourning Beloveth allegedly formed in 1992 (their first demo wouldn’t come until four years later), that doesn’t mean MDB couldn’t have influenced them as they went along. If anything, all that says is they had more time to hone their own sound and they didn’t.

Again, not saying they couldn’t have become something wholly different in the years since. I genuinely wouldn’t know since I haven’t heard the records. Just saying that I probably should have put a little more thought into contextualizing the name Mourning Beloveth before I bought the album. Six bucks I won’t see again. Hindsight is… something or other.

Tags: Grau, Ireland, Mourning Beloveth, Record Shopping

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 24th, 2009 at 12:59 pm and is filed under Buried Treasure. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.