Dead to a Dying World - Elegy

We were happy and in agreement for a few days when the new Inter Arma album came out, but after the underwhelming Sunn O))) album and now this Dead to a Dying World debut, I’m glad I’m not dating metal Twitter because would be getting in disagreements over everything all the time. It’s fine for couples to disagree and shit, though, that’s not the point I’m getting at. The point I’m trying to make with this dumb, jokey intro is that once again metal Twitter (or at least the section of it that follows underground labels) is hyped up and excited about an album that I’m just not seeing what the big deal is about it. In this case, it’s the new Dead to a Dying World album, Elegy, released a couple weeks ago on Profound Lore, which I have been repeated trying to get into, but honestly has just not been wowing me. And this mainly comes from its compositional lack of imagination.

The band seems to substitute superficial shifts in tone and/or style for well-thought-out, fleshed out dynamics to shortcut their way to a sense of emotional diversity across their album. But it seems like the band just stuck with the very first and most instictual writing choices they made and never looked back or questioned if they could do something better to sequence their ideas (which aren’t themselves very special either). And that can work just fine for albums like Rob Zombie’s Hellbilly Deluxe or Rammstein’s Sehnsucht, whose simplicity and directness is part of the appeal. But Dead to a Dying World are trying to conjure some deeply woeful atmosphere here, and the ideas they incorporate do so little to actually draw one into that atmosphere, which ends up being more of a faint, distant melancholy than anything else. And this is due to the shortage of uniquely creative ideas on the album.

While it’s easy to misconstrue ambient music and even its metallic cousins as not needing to generate intriguing motifs or ideas, the best ambient albums and atmospheric black metal albums out there reveal that to not be the case at all. Ambience is not an excuse to skimp on inventive musical ideas or at least memorable ideas, and Dead to a Dying World seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking that unique musical ideas at the small scale aren’t important, hopefully unconsciously.

By no means is Elegy as painful or grating of a listen as, say, the collaborative trainwreck that was the Mark Morton solo album, or Lil Pump’s joyless sophomore flop earlier this year, or Black Veil Brides’ Vale last year. Elegy is just a disappointingly uneventful listen, and one whose compositional choices suggest it was trying to be a more dynamic and immersive album than what it ended up being.

I can credit the band for at least branching out from ambient black metal’s and post-metal’s usual sources of stylistic inspiration. I appreciate the melancholic ambient folk of the intro track, “Syzygy”, the subtly tantalizing wavering female vocal line on “Vernal Equinox” that builds the song’s tension to its intentionally minimally resolved end, and at least the connecting thread to the band’s more ambient tendencies that the string sections placed throughout the closing track provide. And I say that because the band truly is at their strongest when they’re trying to build the album’s ambiance with actual ambient musical elements; they honestly don’t seem to have the wherewithal to elevate the loudness of their ambience with the bombast of the more metallic elements they utilize so clumsily, which the various shifts from soft ambiance to black metallic ambiance in the closing track illustrate vividly enough (as even the thin strings that I enjoyed in early sections of the song wear out their welcome through serious overuse).

I certainly don’t enjoy being the guy that doesn’t like the album everyone else is into, but I feel like the adoration for this thing has been so premature and has potentially come from an initial mesmerization by the few unusual ambient stylistic choices and the thin sense of atmospheric dynamic the band is able to drum up through the shifts from bland musical ideas.

I have been giving my absurd scores out of 10 at the end of these this year and I’ve liked how it’s given me a chance to sum it all up in one phrase, and when I was thinking about what “score” to give this one, my first, attempting-to-be-gracious thought was “competent”, but on second thought I wondered why I was trying to just give them points for being able to play post-metal at a technical level. The band essentially only do half of the compositional work to flesh out the musical ideas they seem to have had going in (many of which seem like they had more potential than the end product), and it seems most of the ideas were rooted entirely in aesthetic. And I’m not asking for a dense packing of riffs in my ambient metal, but when it comes to the styles the band incorporated, aesthetic alone does not an album make, and the band (in my opinion) need to put more focus on that side of their work going forward. Again, I don’t like being the party pooper, but I’m not going to hide how I feel, because healthy couples communicate openly and honestly about their feelings.

Half-competent/10