Grey Skies Fallen - Cold Dead Lands (2020)^{Release ID: 16484}

New York trio Grey Skies Fallen's fifth full-length album combines epic doom metal in the vein of Candlemass or Solstice with gothic death doom as practiced by the likes of My Dying Bride or Swallow the Sun to forge a two-pronged crown of triumphantly morbid doom metal. The album has quite a progressive feel with it's changes in tone as it expounds it's future history of a dying world and the initial melancholy resignation of it's last inhabitants that ultimately transforms into anger at those who are seen as being the cause of this ruin. Of course this can be viewed as an allegorical comment on the seeming indifference of the powerful to the fate of mankind as a whole, focussing all their efforts instead to the maintenance of that power - and that is exactly what I think the band intended.

This is a skillfully assembled album that explores doom metal's ability to relate a concept and evince the variety of emotions needed to engage the listener with it successfully and as such must be considered a success.