Here is the first full length from these doom metal stars. On this album the band is still clinging to their death metal roots. All the vocals are your standard death metal growl, and the songs "The Forever People" and "Erotic Literature" are the straightforward death metal affairs. But it's the remaining songs that are the real highlight of the album.

After an opening instrumental track, the album kicks into the classic "Sear Me" (a different version of which also appears on the "Turn Loose the Swans" album), which sets the atmosphere to a really sorrowful mode. This kind of heavy, baroque, sorrow penetrates the remaining, and quite beautiful in their grandeur grief, songs ("Vast Choirs," "Bitterness and the Bereavement," and the epic "The Return of the Beautiful"), which are supplemented by the no less sorrowful lyrics. Although, the band couldn't resist throwing death metal sections into each of these songs, it does not obliterate the mood, but rather intensifies it. From what I know, when "As the Flower Withers" came out, it created quite a stir within the death metal community, but the band abandoned this style already on their next album, opting, instead, for the more polished and less brutal style.

The bottom line is that this album is a successful mixture of death metal and Goth, and it would be a great acquisition for any death metal fan (not to mention any doom metal fan), who is looking to expand his boundaries but afraid to be called a wimp.

© 1999 boris