Mirror Reaper simulates that totality of grief, but it also transcends its own function as a eulogy. Mourning overwhelms the mourner it often feels as though it is the whole world. It’s like the emptiness grows once there are more people to feel it. When Desmond answers him and the drums clatter back in, the feeling only multiplies. Moggridge’s voice lilts, gentle and devastating, as though he’s crying out for someone, anyone, to hear him, as though he’s not sure there’s another living soul on the scorched earth. Mirror Reaper’s stark final act, which features lyrics sung by the band’s continuing collaborator Erik Moggridge, ranks among the loveliest and saddest moments the band has recorded. The loss of their friend bores holes in the music itself. Their instruments echo into beats of silence. Then the cresting waves of sound fall away, and on Mirror Reaper’s second side, Shreibman and Desmond wade through acres of empty space.
Guerra is dead, and he is singing with his former band they are mourning him and they are with him at the same time. Here is where the tension of the album’s first side climaxes, where life and death seem to pierce each other. Halfway through the album, Guerra’s voice appears, too, in a sequence the band has titled “The Words of the Dead.” These screams were recorded for, and cut from, Four Phantoms, and they form the living emotional core of Mirror Reaper. He sounds like he’s standing far from the microphone, and the contrast between his stoic detachment and Shreibman’s visceral roar emphasizes the album’s lyrical themes of duality: between life and death, sorrow and relief, the body and its fleeing ghost. Shreibman issues a low, diaphragm-racking growl between the drummer’s parts, Desmond sings clean, his voice multi-tracked so as to emulate a Gregorian choir. Plenty of metal bands play impressively in step, but here, Desmond and Shreibman play as though they are clinging to each other.īoth members of the band sing, as did Desmond and Guerra, and their voices feel both distinct and entwined. He’s newly joined by the sounds of Shreibman’s Hammond B3 organ, whose chords tangle with the distortion on the bass and the echo of the cymbals. He exploits the upper range of his bass, digging out emotional extremes from the notes that could be mapped onto the low end of an electric guitar if they weren’t quite so rich with overtones. About 33 minutes into Mirror Reaper, he climbs a crescendo that, in its tone and its simplicity, sounds like a human voice singing a funeral hymn to itself. Bell Witch do just that in Mirror Reaper’s quiet moments, which are more abundant than their previous albums, and also in its loud ones, where Shreibman lurches forward one kick of the bass drum at a time and Desmond carves mournful leads out of his extra wide fretboard.įew bassists can make their instrument sing quite like Desmond. Doom metal works with fewer notes at a time than thrash or death metal, so the key to its emotional power is to pour everything you’ve got into each one. Each beat of Jesse Shreibman’s drum kit, each throb of Dylan Desmond’s six-string bass sounds labored, as though they’ve had to drag the sounds out like lead hammers. Arranged as a single 83-minute track, Mirror Reaper steps back from the resplendent gestures that swept across Four Phantoms.
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