November 2023 - Feature Release - The Fallen Edition

For this month's feature release, I picked out a little EP from Nevada doom band Subrosa, notable for their use of classical string instruments.

https://metal.academy/releases/8158

I hadn't heard this generally overlooked release before but it ended up really surprising me. It essentially offers a dreary (in a good way) brand of doom metal with tense violins & female vocals. The vocals are probably the weaker link & limit how far my scoring could go but there's a nice atmosphere on display & I couldn't help but become engaged. Opening track "Sexual Collateral" is decent enough but the remaining two songs step things up to a really solid level which sees my claiming "Swans Trapped in Ice" as an excellent feature release nomination. Well done Morpheus.

4/5

SubRosa is an old favorite band of mine. I don't know how I found them, but I found the whole whole female-fronted sludge/stoner metal with violins idea a lot more intriguing than I normally would. While they used the violins on their debut album, it was far more sparingly than they would use starting here.
They really sought to make this album as crushingly heavy and depressing as possible. Usually when one thinks of metal and violins, one thinks of the later providing some contrast. Not so here, here it's just another element adding to the sorrow. There's a very on-edge effect the violins add. Without it, the band would be quite mundane, with it, a tension atypical of such bands.
While I like the EP, it's only after trying to figure out what the albums before and after it have that this lacks that I figured out what was missing. Two of the three tracks were remade for the follow-up, No Help for the Mighty Ones, and those versions of the songs are just better in every way.

3.5/5