Album Review: Raventale – Morphine Dead Gardens (Ashen Dominion)

Raventale return with a new album entitled, Morphine Dead Gardens. A 60-minute long concentrated atmospheric funeral doom metal, full of empathic melodies, catatonic viscosity and ether saturation. Let the dizzying temptation lead you this path of estrangement and join into the morphine trance of the silence.

The album is out on September 9th 2019 via Ashen Dominion.

Funeral doom is an acquired taste. A sub-genre that few will say ‘got them into metal’ but many will say once they found it, they fell in love with it.

When those two words are mentioned, it conjures up images of the bleakest and most melancholy of metal all wrapped up in a booming assault that leaves the mind in something of a dribbling mess.

This is exactly what we get with Raventale’s Morphine Dead Gardens. An absolute showcase of the strength of funeral doom while also highlighting some of the problems. The most obvious being the length of each track.

Take the opener, As An Empty Shell for example. It’s nearly 14 minutes long, starts hot and never lets up beginning to slip into repetition as it goes on. It’s mind-numbing which is both to its credit and determent overall.

Both Lorn and Deserted and This Forsaken Place doesn’t change the formula with the vocals reaching impossible levels of gurgling and roaring. The major take away here though is the pleasing melody that is littered throughout, particularly in the former. Melancholic as hell, it’s still a bright light amongst such depressive doom.

If you’re still alive and kicking, In the Bitter Pain does everything to make sure you’re not. The depths it drags is outstanding yet once again, it offers moments of relief that make it a really enjoyable listen.

Finally Morphine Gardens is one last titanic effort, a slow crawl to the finish line before the mind fully decays. It requires some serious effort from the listener but it’s the most effective track thanks to a much more inspiring drift from heaviness to lightness.

Raventale – Morphine Dead Gardens Full Track Listing:

1. As An Empty Shell
2. Lorn and Deserted
3. This Forsaken Place
4. In the Bitter Pain
5. Morphine Gardens

Links

Bandcamp | Ashen Dominion | Facebook