Monday, December 3, 2012

... BITTER RESOLVE "The Early Interstellar Medium" (NEW album review)

If you're an attentive reader of the blog, the name of BITTER RESOLVE should then be already familiar to you, as this is my 4th post on them this year !!!
This spaced-out Doom trio from North Carolina has just released a new album after their excellent debut "Bows and Arrows Against the Lightning" in summer 2011.
Where 1st album had a very special production, rough and particularly enhancing the crushingess of the rythmic section, we've got here on "The Early Interstellar Medium" a pretty different result in terms of sound, much clearer with all instruments homogeneously valued. This fits perfectly well with the nice evolution they quickly show through an approach that is to my ears more melodic, though this doesn't mean there's more progressive hints, nor that this became more easy listening stuff.
Still fond of slow and downtuned tempos, the nebulous which enveloped the roughness of the guitars has slightly disappeared to create something more mysterious, at times despaired and menacing ("Mercury at Dusk", "Bombing People with People") at others melancholic and progressive ("C85 Omicron Velorum Cluster", "Ethereal Ship").
Vocals have improved too, more varied, adventuring nicely in lower tones but generally keeping that clear, painful, invocating tone ; and what about Lauren on drums ? she had just a few weeks of practise with the band when recording "Bows and Arrows...", but now takes a more influential part in the band's sound and maintains a hard hitting force to it.
Corey on guitars has managed to find a more personnal sound, doomier and more compact too; if a kind of parallel could be done with both album covers , I would say that his composition is here more colder and melancholic than fuzzy and burning... His taste for psychedelic, spacey solos and nice cosmic effects confirms the potencial of Bitter Resolve to put brillantly notes on their deep interest for astronomical and cosmic subjects but the band never tends to jaming extents, they never lose sight that they are DOOM even if not easy to classify in any special branch of it in any point... but who gives a shit ? BITTER RESOLVE play their kind of DOOM and they're fucking good at it !!!

"The Early Interstellar Medium" can be digitally purchased on Bandcamp and the vynil edition should be ready very very soon, watch out on their FB page within the next days to get all necessary infos on it.





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