ALBUM REVIEW: The Weight Of Remembrance – Tribunal
It’s always exciting to welcome a new band into the fold of heavy music. A fresh new proponent for whom we can once again dive into their influences and see how they regurgitate them into their own sonic endeavours, hopefully becoming treasured new additions to our heaving personal collections. It’s a pleasure then to roll out the grimy black carpet for TRIBUNAL, a gothic doom duo from Vancouver comprising classically trained cellist, bassist and vocalist Soren Mourne and guitarist/vocalist Etienne Flinn. Their debut album The Weight Of Remembrance offers the kind of grandeur and theatricality you’d expect from its core components, and serves it up with a healthy dose of blunt-force trauma.
The mysterious and creepy opening of Initiation gets its hooks in instantly; frightfully emotive with a dramatic flair, Mourne‘s vocalisations give way to a great big riff that sounds as if it’s barrelled its way out of the catacombs to exact its revenge on the world. Flinn‘s roars and death growls are rock solid too, and working in tandem with the cleaner, near-operatic lines of Mourne, there’s a fantastic amount of dynamism. It’s a characteristic that works well across the whole play time of The Weight Of Remembrance, but never feels tired or gimmicky. It’s a fine balance perfectly struck by the duo.
Lead single Apathy’s Keep is a pitch black slab of gothic finery, using a distinctly 90s heavy gothic riff that sounds like it’s come straight from the PARADISE LOST playbook, and when the pace picks up for Flinn to unleash one of his most fearsome roars of the record, it’s spine-tingling stuff. Similarly, Without Answer dials up the pomp and majesty, allowing soaring guitar solos and classical strings to interplay in a fantastically-realised musical crossover event that furnishes yet more death growls and ethereal cleans.
Of Creeping Moss And Crumbled Stone is the standout highlight here though. A captivating and unresting testament to the power of gothic doom when executed as well as this, the powerful chorus gives the album its obvious live highlight, and the riffs are mesmeric without sacrificing any of the heft. But if we’re splitting hairs, this unveils a sequencing issue with The Weight Of Remembrance. Because for as good as this track is (and it really is spectacular), it’s the kind of song that sounds like it should be closing the album. Not just to go out on a high, but because the outro for the track sounds final, definitive. Instead, it opens back up into a bunch of songs that never match the phenomenal intensity and quality of Of Creeping Moss And Crumbled Stone, which results in an uneven and waning lifespan. Again, this whole album is of high quality, but having such a clear highlight so early on in the tracklist is only detrimental to the whole product.
All in all though, The Weight Of Remembrance showcases a wicked blend of gothic drama and crushing doom that’s as cold and relentless as the genre tag deserves. It may not bring much that you’ve not heard before, but who cares when it sounds this good? What really pumps this one up though is remembering that this is TRIBUNAL’s debut. A solid first step on the ladder of doom domination and ones to watch for the future.
Rating: 7/10
The Weight Of Remembrance is set for release on January 20th via 20 Buck Spin.
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