Mourners Lament – We All Be Given (Hammerheart)
Wednesday, 29th March 2017Their name taken from the Opeth song “Harvest,” where Mikael Åkerfeldt gracefully croons “mourner’s lament but it is me who is the martyr,” Mourners Lament are a Chilean death/doom ensemble who have been kicking around since 2004. We All Be Given happens to be the band’s first proper full-length, this, after an eight-year period of silence going back to their Unbroken Solemnity EP. Nevertheless, the band props up a relatively hardy and mostly compact six-song offering on We All Be Given.
Best compared to Novembers’ Doom (here’s a tip: don’t listen to the two bands back-to-back. It may prompt confusion.), Mourners Lament posess the expected grip on slow-churned, heavy-on-the-chug doom. While not quite as emotive as Novembers’ Doom, ML manage to tug at the ‘ol heartstrings on “Slumbers” by way of a nimble-footed melodic guitar riff placed at the song’s center. The album comes to a head on “Suffocating Hopes,” which trods along in funeral doom fashion, regularly pumping out blustery guitar harmonies to go along with the always-gruff vocals of Cristian Ibañez, who, in between his bouts of harshness, throws in some spoken-word bits.
This type of one-tempo, or “down-tempo” doom eventually tends to reach its tipping point after a while. Mourners Lament do their best to fend off sonic complacency with double-bass ripples on “This Storm” and the somewhat meandering, 13-minute title track. Ultimately, We All Be Given is demonstrative of a band who is never in a hurry to let the doom slow-burn carry on, deeper down, into the gallows, and through the depths.