There cannot have been many more eagerly awaited releases this year than For This We Fought the Battle of Ages (Profound Lore Records), the fourth full-length from Utah Chamber Doom purveyors SubRosa. The band’s supreme melding of crushing weight with mournful, harrowing melody reached epic levels on last album More Constant Than the Gods (Profound Lore Records), with album highlight ‘Cosey Mo’ being this particular scribe’s tune of the century thus far.
If the description ‘Chamber Doom’ raises eyebrows, the initial eerie atmospherics and subsequent planet-shifting battle of riffs and strings will dilate the pupils. Rebecca Vernon’s morphing voice lifts, lulls and scares the senses: its vehement discourse in the wonderfully building cataclysm of album opener ‘Despair Is a Siren’ tempered by the lilting beauty of more benign passages, the coda both shuddering and incredibly touching. The utter bludgeon of the slow, pulverising crescendos, meanwhile, is cushioned by a wonderful musicality, with the duel between strings and rhythm from ‘…Siren’s halfway point an ecstatic display of skill, creativity and power.
The true magic of the band lies in the wondrous ability to blend such disparate musical elements and bring them to life in one entity. The stirring Folk-Torch vocals and haunting strings of Vernon, Sarah Pendleton and Kim Pack become suddenly fired by wounded anger and fulminating rage, culminating in a guttural harshness during the occasionally groove-infused ‘Wound of the Warden’. Vernon’s voice comes close to breaking in the violent emotion of the track, whilst the tender side returns to subtly introduce the unbelievably moving, morose epic ‘Black Majesty’ with some paradoxically unsettling lyrics: “Isn’t it good to be acquainted with darkness? / To caress it gently, to slit its throat”.
A brief period of medieval style, All About Eve-infused beauty breaks the pattern with ‘Il Cappio’, the voice all Julianne Regan: before the velveteen pummel recommences with ‘Killing Rapture’, a funereal outset lifted again by the convergence of monolithic rhythms and atmospheric strings, swaying with the distraught madness of Ophelia heading for the river. At times the harmonies can seem almost too gentle, even listless: but this is mere scene-setting for a raucous frolic through Elysian fields, drumming occasionally reaching blastbeat pace, the violins soaring and bounding with the joy and vigour of youthful gazelle. The ever-decreasing circles of guitar in the initial stages of heartbreaking finale ‘Troubled Cells’, meanwhile, are another effective accompaniment to the body of the track: the vocal possessing real emotion, yet retaining a cold indifference portraying the weariness of constant trauma. This album’s real tear-jerker, its blend of explosive fury, pained power and brittle grace reaffirms the band’s raison d’être: to move and obliterate in equal measure.
There is no ‘Cosey Mo’ here. It is potentially a better album for it. SubRosa continues to breathe and grow, and its ability to stir passion and heart-rending sadness is only further proven with surely the most fluid, emotive, engaging and downright magnificent set of its career.
9.5/10.0
PAUL QUINN
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