ALBUM REVIEW: Realm – The Bloody Mallard

One thought that could potentially strike a listener of Realm, the instrumental debut album from THE BLOODY MALLARD, could be classifying the London-based project by guitarist and songwriter Tom Walding as brooding progressive rock. Much of it has to do with musician’s melding psychedelia, prog, and alternative rock, creating a sonic experience that is as enthralling as it is pondering.

In all its desertness, Realm seems like a fitting soundtrack for the regular, everyday life of anyone who has been stranded on the planet for way too long. This is a hefty body of work comprised of long-form tracks depicting gloom and doom alongside restrained shapes and subtle changes, and that is what makes THE BLOODY MALLARD earnestly peculiar and alluring. It almost feels like Walding is inherently attached to the uncontaminated ethereal essence of doom, deeply connecting the listener with the project’s art. The profoundly idiosyncratic and poignantly vibrant drive that powers the music here takes on melodies, rhythms, and tones that were “reminiscent of many mushroom trips in rural Kent.”

Realm coalesces a restraint-testing 40 minutes of both dense and airy doom, embellished with stunning moments of tranquillity, experimental nudges, disquieting ambience, and pulverising heaviness. This whole event is held together by mindfully constructed songs and wild execution. The record shuffles at its own laid-back rate across vast sonic voyages, as THE BLOODY MALLARD often take a torpid approach to their landing places, scaling back and forth the robust riff work and humping grooves that are the usual go-to when it comes to this type of music. The mountainous 11-and-a-half minute epic Haemoglobin is an often mellow, progressive and always interesting journey, pulling the feelings through the delicate, diverse delivery, while the sublime dynamic shifts and extremely striking melodies colour the darkly-tinted gloomy art with more vivid slashes of hope. The two-part Ceremonious Synapsis sounds attached transcendentally and is a more melodically bright and perfectly respectable continuation.

Realm is an affecting and victorious musical prologue for THE BLOODY MALLARD, hinting unblemished craftsmanship that is to blossom up from here on. It’s by no means a perfect album, waddling through strenuous terrains. The album should be intriguing for anyone seeking a genuinely mighty, mesmerising, and heartfelt doom affair that tears at nerves, looks deeply inward, and disturbs feelings. In some strange way, Realm feels like an album of regaining that chisels away at any standing barricades between Walding and the outer realms.

Rating: 7/10

Realm is out now via self-release.

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