Label - Church Road Records
Release Date- 27th January 2023
Words- Tony Bliss
It’s a fact universally acknowledged; when a metal album opens with the tolling of church bells, you know it’s the real deal. Although with four ex-members of a much beloved The King Is Blind in their ranks, there was little doubt that Grief Symposium would meet expectations, but even with their iron-clad credentials promising something as exciting and thunderous as all hell, few debut albums emerge as box-fresh and brilliant as ‘...In The Absence Of Light’.
Coming on like Tom G Warrior jamming with a fledgling Paradise Lost some time in the (very) early nineties, the subtle gothic textures and cobwebbed atmospherics of the Peaceville Three - as well as a heavy-handed axis of Hellhammer/Celtic Frost/Triptykon riff devotion - are writ large across these seven tracks. Make no mistake however, for all its bone-powdering extremity and muscular facade, this can be as much an avant-garde curios as a doom metal club-swinger.
Indeed, as the chimes fade and ‘Among Dead Gods’ heaves into gear like some ungainly, Candlemass-bred monster, the fact that these lads wield some serious power is quickly thrust into your panic-stricken ears. In thanks largely to an immaculate production job, there is a real sense here that Grief Symposium are spiritually tethered to the old-school, whilst sounding as gargantuan and hewn-from-titanium heavy as any of the scenes uber hench new-breed - at points sounding akin to Mental Funeral-era Autopsy given a steroidal dose of modern mixing- board muscle (‘Veil Of Transformation’), and even occasionally doffing their collective cap at two-step hardcore (‘Temple Of Decay’) or the slowest, sludgiest, nastiest riffs a peak-form Machine Head may conjure up (‘Descent Into Pandemonium’). Ladle on top of all that the abysmal, obsidian-like darkness of later-day Immolation, and you’ve got the sort of metallic treat even the most thick-headed of elitists will be taken aback by.
As hinted at earlier however, this band's talents stretch far beyond just caveman bludgeoning. The most obvious example of this, closing track ‘The Amber Kiss Of The Sun’, is a nineteen-minute mood piece, bubbling along on a bed of Tangerine Dream-ish pulsing and swelling with some spoken word snippets ebbing in and out of the drama. These left turns are not without precedent on the album - ‘In The Shadow Of The Sleeping Monarch’ mutates from an opening monologue into a straight-up extreme metal disembowelling before a mesmeric, key led orchestral finale, and ‘Esoteric Mirrors’ dissolves into a gently plucked, Ahab-at-their-most-serene outro - but this track alone tells us much of the fearlessness and ambition of Grief Symposium, and indeed the trust in their audience, to bow out on such a gusty stylistic curveball.
Whether they are plundering a vault full of deadly, Cathedral-style groove worship, or nudging at the fringes of ambient derring-do, ‘...In The Absence Of Light’ continues to wring fresh dynamics from every note whilst never shaking the timeless, arcane stench of 90's death-doom. As it is, Grief Symposium already sound darker, sharper, heavier AND braver than the majority of their peers, and '...In The Absence Of Light' is a bloody astonishing first outing.
9/10
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