ALBUM REVIEW: Lost Empyrean – Dirge

After a lengthy period, crafting and perfecting this latest album, DIRGE emerge, four years after the release of Hyperion, to bring us Lost Empyrean. Having always experimented with industrial and post metal sounds, the band’s tendencies towards sludge and doom have put them above others throughout their career. Will their efficiency at standing apart from the crowd prove them once more as masters of their craft?

Our opening to Wingless Multitudes is a swirling mass of swelling guitars and symbols. The building of one rhythm over another, then over melody, over bass creates such a scale that you’re instantly transported into the headspace. It thunders unabashed, a towering wall of menacing purpose and might. After such a long wait, DIRGE have the strength to maintain their ambience in the great scale of their music. The wonderfully drawn out opening allows the music enough time to breathe and embed itself in you, before the cries of Marc T overlay a distinctive vocal. There echoes a lighter synth sound, a layering of bells and symphonic tones brings a satanic presence to the bending guitars and the twisting melody.

Hosea 87 carries on the same melodic tone as it’s predecessor, with a little more drive to the distorted guitars. It’s both the basic rhythmic ideals of sludge and doom, with the mass production value of progressive and industrial music. The weight becomes subtly more and more crushing, an overpowering sense of things bigger than yourself spans out the great scope that is laid out before you. There’s plenty to be gained from the emotionally charged vocals, and on repeat listens the trance like vibe of the drums and continuous guitars. There’s a power in knowing when to reserve your energies to create a constant emotive album that is an intangible quality. The instants of light are a glimmer in the sea of dissonance.

High, electronic sounds, a mechanical sirens call, introduce us to Algid Troy, as an fuzz of keys burns as an undercurrent. The tension breaks to the bellowing, primal drums, and the surging, sluggish guitars. Once again, the tone is uncompromisingly DIRGE; lingering notes pull the track from hopeful to mournful, with an expanse of sounds weaving around them like a storm cloud. The beauty of DIRGE is that they never look to overplay, even with their huge, ambitious sounds. A moment of quite elapses, a simple grouping of notes over a muddied, effected guitar. The shock of the drums is almost staggering as the might of the band rears to full height, tormented vocals, both spoken like a spell and shouted like a man half lost to himself. The tumultuous ending minutes are a real triumph, unbridled in their ferocity. This is the moment to strike, to break the restraints.

The Burden Of Almost sets is course on a different path across the same waves. Crashing, towering movements as far as the mind can carry you are pitted with only moments of peace, before being lost to the overpowering scale of soaring, echoing guitars once more. It’s other worldliness is only enhanced by gravelled vocals that are almost lost to the ambience of it all, like some distant god. This track feels so much like panic and the peacefulness of watching a great storm unfold across a great ocean. The unease of what you hear comes in the relentlessness, the huge amount of sound on display, and yet the calm of surrendering under it is like an embrace.

Unexpectedly, we come to Lost Empyrean on the sounds of earth, and breath, while a soundscape of reverberating guitars shines down like stars. Just as your submerging into this new atmosphere, the downpour of deep vocals and even deeper guitars crushes you from above. Things spiral down, into a menacing round off that lifts into a guitar; it’s a thrill to have such turbulent glimpses of where the music might turn next, but you’ll never be quite able to apprehend the vision DIRGE have in store. Something akin to a low alarm, a single note pushes against the melody. The track changes its angle yet again to gain even more dreaded momentum. You can almost taste the unstoppable drive behind this beast. It’s both demonic, and godly, in that there’s a force at work we can’t understand. It’s dark and it’s vastly more powerful than ourselves, a brilliant soundscape for dramatic thoughts and deep evaluation on our hearts and souls.

A Sea Of Light begins in a thoroughly doom-like manner. The vocals take a much more direct centre stage than any previous track, as the distorted guitars jagger against each other. A much simpler tone is a light relief here, and DIRGE’s post-metal side takes the reins. The weight is lifted on this track somewhat, but it doesn’t lose any of the potency that has thus far been created. If anything, by narrowing the expanse of the sounds into a more concentrated amount, it allows the instruments on offer the opportunity to flex themselves in a different way. There are still those sludgy moments, but the guitars are sharper, and more focused towards a hopeful sound that works nicely against the lyrics.

With no intentions of easing off at the end, Sarracenia initially is as far into doom territory as DIRGE goes. The sparse drums and the smashing of symbols under the droning of guitars and the melancholy tone is undeniably powerful. However, the strange angle it takes, with weird melodic movements and mechanical gurgling sounds interjected, before calming clean vocals resonate across the whole thing makes for a truly unusual experience. The mixture of the light and the dark parts of DIRGE come together as one mighty force of nature here. A length of time passes where the peaceful reflection of choral voices whispers around the airy guitars, as the mammoth, beating beast of their murkiest material rumbles below. There’s so much to experience, the spiritual nature of this track and all it’s many avenues of exploration leaves you exhausted, and yet hungry for more.

The word powerful seems like an understatement, and yet simply there is no other word for what DIRGE has created on Lost Empyrean. Massive in both its soundscapes and emotional effect, the success of Lost Empyrean lies in the fact that DIRGE understands how to craft complexly and yet achieve an almost spiritual influence that defies simple characterisation.

Rating: 8/10

Lost Empyrean is set for release on December 14th via Debemur Morti Productions.

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