Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for My Dying Bride - Turn Loose the Swans (1993)
As I further my listening in The Fallen clan I inevitably find myself with my first MDB album. I cannot articulate why I have never ventured into MDB over the last three decades. It is not that I recall any poor experience of one song that turned me off them although I predict that if I had heard Turn Loose the Swans back in 1993 I would not have gotten past album opener Sear Me MCMXCIII as my Pantera-adled brain would not have tolerated such a dreary number. In so many ways TLtS is a gift that I can only appreciate with age, as it is an album that transcends a mere death/doom tag over its seven tracks and is in fact a lot to take in.
This is an album that manages to felt as well as heard. It has tangible form and edges as well as an interesting interior to explore also. Whether it is the destitute crooning of Aaron Stainthorpe that you feel in the very pit of your stomach or the melancholic stabbing riffs of Andrew Craighan and Calvin Robertshaw that fill your head with heaviest of dark thoughts, there is always an experience to be had with any part of TLtS. Rick Miah more than deserves a mention also with his drumming providing a consistent and solid backdrop to whole despondent atmosphere of the album. The drum patterns manage to sit in the space between simple percussion and expansive detail. Never lost and never overpowering, this is one of the most balanced drum performances I have heard for some time.
Props also for the subtle use of the violin and keyboards. Martin Powell manages to make his presence felt without turning the album into a wishy-washy, gothic affair. The guitars, drums and vocals are genuinely allowed to shine with the keys and classical strings seeping in to support them or compliment perfectly the more down tempo moments. The Snow in My Hand is a great example of how they violin is effectively used to introduce the song, set the tone and then hand it over to the doomier aspects of the sound. In terms of the true death/doom content, I would argue that this is quite sparse overall and only comes into play from around the halfway point of the album. Indeed, I would go as far as to suggest that TLtS is a real grower of an album overall in terms of staying true to its overall genre classification. The elements of gothic and doom metal certainly dominate the first part of the album, yet when the death/doom content is displayed it does not push any of these other elements aside. The band merely combine them as new component parts to the sound and as a result the album has a real sense of development to it. At the same time all tracks seem somehow interconnected. Listening to the aforementioned The Snow in My Hand you cannot help but think of album opener Sear Me MCMXCIII. I am not aware that the album is a concept album and so I can only put this down to sheer consistency.
Building as it goes along, the release hits its peak shortly before the end of the record as the two lengthier tracks, Crown of Sympathy and the title track, truly showcase the song writing prowess of the band. Dramatic, grandiose (trumpet fanfare) and utterly desperate, both tracks encompass the overall experience of TLtS perfectly. I cannot pretend to have hit it off with this record from the outset and I have in fact been listening to it on and off for weeks now just to get to the point of being able to gather my thoughts for a review. At first (as with Anathema) I did find it a little bleating at times but this issue soon dispersed over repeated listens. Despite the experimentation, the record maintains a real death/doom ethos at its core and is one of the best records I have heard to date in my exploration of The Fallen clan.