My god... how long has it been? How long has it been since I found a funeral doom album that really hit all the right notes? Years?
The idea of male and female vocals with ultra slow tempos has been done before - and it's been done very well before. What Collapse of Light does with this style though is nothing short of profound.
So much of funeral doom fails to live up to the potential of the genre. When a band plays as slow as the genre calls for, I expect the impact to be immense. I don't just want to hear the music, I want to F E E L it. I want the riffs to be the weight of a glacier moving over the landscape and crushing anything in its path. It is incredibly rare that a band actually achieves that. Collapse of Light is one of the few bands that does.
The album starts out with a cello playing a sombre and mournful tune. It's joined periodically by a violin and the duet form a musical dance that whisks me away with it's splendor. When the guitars finally do come in they do so with a crashing command that has all the crushing weight that I want out of this genre. Shortly after the duet of clean male and female vocals take the place of the stringed instruments for a time.
Several minutes in and the song has not even introduced harsh vocals. When they finally do come in, the song shifts down a gear and even slower as the hearken in the gutterals. This is the point where the song has fully evolved from it's fragile beginnings into a behemoth that is near unstoppable.
The beauty of Each Failing Step is exactly such. The album goes through ebbs and flows like few other albums can. It knows when to be quiet. It knows when to be fragile. It knows when to rage. It knows when to dominate. It just knows what to be and when. A near perfect representation of the funeral doom genre and all the potential it is capable of.
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