ALBUM REVIEW: …To Tread The Ancient Waters – Amaurot
Gothic doom. A phrase that’ll either have you rushing for headphones or the hills, the genre fuses melodrama and melancholy with the greats creating sublime works of emotional resonance. AMAUROT are a new band wading into the murky quagmire of doom, armed with their debut album …To Tread The Ancient Waters and pitching themselves for fans of bands like DRACONIAN, CANDLEMASS and others of their miserly ilk. Those are some lofty comparisons indeed and AMAUROT are setting their sights high; unfortunately for them then, that …To Tread The Ancient Waters does exactly that, treading water for 50-plus minutes with some incredibly middle of the road doom.
It’s not that To Tread… is a bad album. Opener Aether Child promises emotional ruin in its morose melodies; it’s drenched in classic, epic doom, with entrancing, sometimes breathy vocals from Lisa Reiger. She also delves into a more operatic range across the song and album, which while again not bad by any stretch, is simply… fine. The same goes for the growled vocals; they lend a gravitas to the songs here, but they’re frustratingly one-note a majority of the time. Des Wanderers Leid, on the other hand, opens with a folkier passage, with strings and acoustic guitars together though for a lamentably short time. The main riff lumbers into view before gutturals and a spoken word passage that isn’t so much ill-placed as unnecessary.
Gone Forever doesn’t so much keep up the pace – this is doom after all – as ensure the glacier keeps marching inexorably forwards. The melodic vocals are ethereally beautiful, with a chugging riff under them that’s impossible not to at least nod along to, while Loneliness echoes its name with a guitar lick that sounds bereft of all happiness or hope along with the backing choirs, and the winding twin melodies halfway through are particularly earwormy.
The second half, though, is much the same as the first, just stretched out even further, with three of the four songs hitting the seven-minute mark with ease. There’s also precious little variety in tempo across the album as a whole, with only two songs across its entire runtime utilising any tempo change at all. Starless Sky, the sixth, bulks up the doom with an injection of furious death metal and a passage that gets dangerously close to a gallop with “oh-oh” backing choirs to its rumbling guitars and guttural roars. It’s the strongest song on the album purely for its sonic variety. Finally, Phoenician Ashes closes and goes from an almost off-beat slow pace to slightly less of a plod for its midsection; that’s it.
It’s difficult to know what to make of …To Tread The Ancient Waters. AMAUROT have talent and real songcraft, that much is clear from Starless Sky, but it’s painfully underutilised, even for a debut. Other than the aforementioned song, it’s very much gothic doom by numbers that doesn’t do anything that other bands do better already. But again, this is a debut. There’s room to grow, and if the band can find their own voice and more than one tempo, there could be much brighter (gloomier?) things in store for them.
Rating: 6/10
…To Tread The Ancient Waters is set for release on September 30th via Obelisk Polaris Productions.
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