Band:	Mourning Beloveth
Album:	The Sullen Sulcus
Style:	Death doom metal
Release date:	December 2002

01. The Words That Crawled
02. It Almost Looked Human
03. The Insolent Caul
04. Narcissistic Funeral
05. My Sullen Sulcus
06. Anger's Steaming Arrows

This is the second real album for the true doom/death Irish band Mourning Beloveth... And this is the kind of album you can expect from an experienced band that has already released a bunch of cds, over a period of ten years. But here, after only a few years of existence, these five depressive guys have released what is meant to be a new doom milestone, the album to which a whole generation will pledge allegiance.

Mourning Beloveth respects the tradition: when in the first words of an album, you can read ?Lie in endless wait behind some cold shadow for a stream of stars that have long since died?, you can be sure that you are listening to a doom band.The rest of the lyrics reaches the highest level of depressing poetry, of the darkest beauty [?There is something painful in the first spring bud of life, it tears at the insides and claws at the doors of tenderness
that riseth in black forms from an obsolete graveyard.?]. To conclude this part, I think these are among the best lyrics I have ever been given to hear.

As regards the music itself, I bet [and I hope] you don's expect speed metal, because even Black Sabbath has never been that slow. The low pace of the riffs can be compared to something like Shape Of Despair for example. This is really very heavy, but at the same time it is sometimes emotionally catchy, thanks to the use of arpeggios that break the omnipresent violence of the songs. But whate stroke me after some listenings is the quality and the intelligence of the arrangements: they make the music so interesting that you almost fell obliged to replay the album when it is over, just to listen once again to a passage that had caught your hear or to find something new... and there is always something new, like this imperceptible change in the drums that adds an epic touch to the end of ?The words that crawled?, or the tremendous clean voice passages, that are rare enough to be interesting. These clean voice passages, coupled to the spoken parts, create an atmosphere that pierce your heart with despair and sadness and bring tears to your eyes [?The words that crawled?, ?Narcissistic funeral?].
Most of the vocals are pure death growlings, sometimes joined by the beauty of clean vocals [the best passages in my opinion, the singer has a fantastic and very special voice], create a contrast with the relative coolness of the music.
Now, I don't find anything else to say but this: 'The Sullen Sulcus' is one of my albums of the year, and it is not far from the maximal rating.

Highlights: The Words That Crawled, Narcissistic Funeral, but the rest is almost as perfect