On their lush, formidable debut, the “dream-doom” duo of Tomb Mold’s Derrick Vella and Innumerable Forms’ Justin DeTore illustrate how emotionally boundless metal can be.
It’s been an exceptional time for metal that sounds like the dying cries of an alien planet being sucked into a black hole. Newer bands like Blood Incantation, Worm, and Spectral Voice have all taken the templates of old school death and doom metal and imbued them with a mystical, psychedelic aura, with songs whose thrashing riffs slowly spill into abstract ambience and shimmering post-rock guitars. Toronto’s Tomb Mold forged one of the heaviest totems yet to this stylistic rebirth with their dark, disorienting 2019 release Planetary Clairvoyance, thanks in no small part to the searing guitar work of Derrick Vella. Now, Vella has returned with Dream Unending—a “dream-doom” project with Innumerable Forms frontman Justin DeTore that pushes his guitar work even further outside the typical confines of metal.
One of the most immediately gripping qualities of Dream Unending’s debut, Tide Turns Eternal, is how much of it completely does away with death metal riffage altogether. Instead, the album is lined with lush, echoing 12-string guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Durutti Column or Cocteau Twins record. A professed disciple of moody 1980s acts like the Cure and the Blue Nile, Vella captures those bands’ ability to weave lonesome, chorus-soaked textures into something yearning and warm, shrouding his wilted melodies in a dense haze of reverb and phaser pedals. As a result, Tide Turns Eternal is one of the most sonically diverse metal albums of the year, pulling a rich prism of tones and effects together to create a phantasmal gaze into the genre at its most heady.
The most direct precedent for Dream Unending’s sound is the gloomy, gothic death/doom spearheaded by the Peaceville Three—the trio of Anathema, My Dying Bride, and Paradise Lost, all signed to the UK label in the early ’90s. But where those bands gravitated toward medieval and grandiose aesthetics, Vella and DeTore are reaching for something more otherworldly. Just listen to “In Cipher I Weep,” which opens on an uncanny fretless bassline and gradually stomps its way toward an eerie church organ climax; or “The Needful,” which starts with a spellbinding Floydian guitar intro and ends on a howling solo that sounds like a comet catching fire in the night sky. Vella and DeTore are constantly pushing each other to discover ruminative new territory, using the trudging march of doom metal to explore their most introspective impulses.
Even on the album’s most heavenly moments—like the billowing fog of guitar chords that arrives four and a half minutes into “Dream Unending”— Vella’s riffs never lose the dissonance of his death metal roots, infusing all of Tide Turns Eternal with a sense of anguish and longing, but also hope. As the album reaches the end of its nearly 10-minute closing title track, a gorgeous vocal passage from Alberta singer-songwriter McKenna Rae enters like a light peeking through the mist. Before long, however, Vella reveals his most unvarnished, brutal riff yet, as DeTore joins in with pounding drums and a guttural, earth-sundering roar. It’s as if the entire album is collapsing in on itself: a harrowing final moment on a record that serves as a reminder of how emotionally boundless metal can be.
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