My Dying Bride - The Thrash of Naked Limbs (1993)^{Release ID: 955}

Another great My Dying Bride EP with some classic material and important experimentation.

The Thrash of Naked Limbs is the second of the three great EPs that My Dying Bride released in the early 90s and it really helped tide over those of us impatiently waiting for the next full length release. As the Flower Withers had been a solid debut album and the band showed immense promise that they might create something truly astounding in the near future. That would happen soon enough with Turn Loose the Swans in 1993, but The Thrash of Naked Limbs is an important transitional piece in the My Dying Bride puzzle, and certainly not to be ignored. It contains the same line-up as the debut and has a total running time of only 18 minutes, but there’s some gold material here as well as some important experimentation that helped develop the band’s sound. There seems to be some confusion as to when Martin Powell officially joined My Dying Bride. There’s no doubt that he was a full time member of the band during the creation of Turn Loose the Swans, but my guess is that he will still acting as a session musician when The Thrash of Naked Limbs was recorded. At this stage, he’s still adding perfectly executed flourishes to pre-existing death doom metal, rather than the fully fledged integration that occurred on later releases.

The title track was responsible for gaining the band a much larger fan base. The guys made a fairly crappy video for it that includes a girl writhing in her bed, a lot of close-ups of eyes, and the band members walking through the woods with lit torches. Somehow during the making of the video clip, drummer Rick Miah had a very nasty fall and broke something or other, causing the band to cancel their upcoming tour. Despite how amateur the video is, it gained a lot of attention on MTV and the EP moved high into the Kerrang charts. The track itself is classic My Dying Bride with heavy doom riffs, death metal drumming, gorgeous classical flourishes and some of Aaron’s most brutal vocals. Rick’s drumming shows good signs of improvement after a lacklustre performance on the debut, but it helps that he gets a much crunchier sound this time round. Final track Gather Me Up Forever contains a purely death metal tone for the majority, but drops down to more typical My Dying Bride velocity in sections. It’s perhaps less impressive than the title track, but it does bring the album home in fine style, with the last moments containing more force and passion than most albums contain in their entirety. But I skipped a track here, so let’s take a backward step.

Le Cerf Malade (which means The Sick Stag in English) takes its cue from the fable of the same name, which was written by French poet Jean de la Fontaine in the 17th century. While it’s next to impossible to actually make out the lyrics, they are taken directly from the poem and are in French. This track is a rather experimental effort for My Dying Bride, being an entirely ambient track. From reading other reviews of the album, this track doesn’t appear to have satisfied many of their fans, who were likely disappointed that the EP contained only two “real” My Dying Bride tracks. As a fan of ambient music I entirely disagree with that sentiment as I think Le Cerf Malade is a really good effort that contains great depth and atmosphere. The bells and rhythmic beats combined with the chanting bring to mind some sort of ancient monastery and the six and a half minutes don’t drag at all due to the changes in textures throughout. While I’m not suggesting that the band should put more completely ambient tracks into their albums, I do think that Le Cerf Malade gave them confidence to include ambient sections within their doom, as can easily be heard in tracks such as The Crown of Sympathy, The Cry of Mankind and The Whore, the Cook and the Mother.

English doom/death legends My Dying Bride had thoroughly blown Ben & I away with their first two releases "Symphonaire Infernus Et Spera Empyrium" & "As The Flower Withers". In fact, their 1991 "Towards The Sinister" demo was really strong too so I had extremely high hopes for their next record as a teenager back in 1993. The band's experimentation with the incorporation of violin & gothic elements had proved to be a master stroke so the expectation around what they'd deliver us with next was certainly very high. Perhaps My Dying Bride's label & management could feel that excitement because they opted to deliver us a short three-track taster in order to tide us over until the arrival of the classic "Turn Loose The Swans" album later on that year. "The Thrash of Naked Limbs" E.P. would land eight months before that spectacular game-changer & it'd only see my passion for the burgeoning doom/death scene rising to fever pitch.

"The Thrash of Naked Limbs" E.P. contains just the three tracks across its eighteen-minute duration, two of which take the form of their signature doom/death metal sound with the other being something a little different for My Dying Bride. The production job on the two metal songs isn't perfect with the rhythm guitars sounding a little wishy washy to my ears & the violin coming across as a tad artificial too. Thankfully though, the riffs are as crushing as we've come to expect from a My Dying Bride release with Aaron's iconic death growls being in full effect. There are some subtle differences from the band's debut album on show here. The guitar tone is starting to head away from the filthy death metal graveyard it had resided in previously &, despite the production issues, the overall package just seems to be a little more polished & professional. The violin parts that permeated "As The Flower Withers" aren't quite as prominent here either as they play more of a supporting role than they do the thematic protagonist we were presented with on some of the band's stronger works to the time. I'd suggest that there isn't quite as much undiluted death metal included in this material either. It's a little more consistently doomy than the earlier releases were.

The E.P. kicks off with the title track which is generally regarded as the strongest inclusion of the three. Interestingly, I'm gonna go the other way & say that it's the track that I connect with the least. Don't get me wrong, it's still a very strong piece that borders on being a classic in its own right but I just don't think it quite gels as well as My Dying Bride's most transcendent & timeless material. Easily the most divisive song is the dark ambient piece "Le cerf malade" that splits the two metal numbers & I have to admit that I've always found it to be the highlight of the record. Admittedly I'm a big ambient music fan & this piece absolutely nails the atmosphere it sets out to explore. In fact, I'd suggest that any ambient artist worth their salt would be drooling over this track to be honest. Closing doom/death anthem "Gather Me Up Forever" goes pretty close to equaling it too. It's the doomier of the two metal songs & doesn't taint its more beautiful & melodic doom moments with chuggier mid-paced riffage as much as the title track does so there's not a hint of filler here with every piece offering the listener a significant artistic & atmospheric pay-off.

"The Thrash of Naked Limbs" doesn't get quite as much attention as its more highly regarded predecessors but I have a big soft spot for the more mature & refined composition that predicted the direction the band would soon take & this saw it making just as big an impact on my life. In fact, I've tended to think of the E.P. as My Dying Bride's strongest overall work to the time & this revisit has only strengthened that feeling even though there's very little between the three proper releases. This is not only an essential My Dying Bride record but it's an essential release for the doom/death subgenre overall. It rightfully stands alongside the band's finest work & should have Paradise Lost, Anathema & Novembers Doom fans frothing at the mouth.