My Dying Bride - The Ghost of Orion (2020)^{Release ID: 17613}

This is My Dying Bride's first album for five years, following a period of inactivity as Aaron Stainthorpe dealt with a family crisis and the departure of a couple of members. Now, I lay no claim to being any authority on MDB, but the songwriting seems to capture their essential gothic mournfullness, the doleful melancholy of their sound heavily accentuated by the violin of Shaun Macgowan and most effective when it is present.

On the negative side, the drum sound is sterile and the production as a whole seems flat, both the clean vocals and guitar being robbed of any passion or bite. In a genre where the atmosphere is key, here it seems to be sadly lacking, as if the feeling has been leeched out during the production process. Not until the second half of the album and it's two longest tracks, The Long Black Land and The Old Earth do the band seem to shrug off the shackles that the recording process has bound them with and allow their passion to show through.

As a result, I've really got to class The Ghost of Orion as a disappointment, despite the songs being well-written, the album is just too lacking in emotion, it's melancholy seemingly deriving from ennui rather than loss, although if the first half was as good as the latter, I think it would have resonated with me more.