Review by Sonny for My Dying Bride - As the Flower Withers (1992)

Me and MDB have a bit of a chequered past. When I was returning to metal in the early 2000s I got hold of mp3 rips of the band's complete discography up to that point (which was up to and including The Dreadful Hours, I think) and I was pretty keen on the Yorkshiremen's sound back then. However, I was playing catch up on the best part of a decade's metal development, during one of it's most evolutionary periods and I found myself exploring alleys and byways that took me further and further from the gothic musings of bands like My Dying Bride and into pastures new. My taste has mutated to such a degree that I am decidedly antipathetical towards what I often now view as the pantomime antics of a lot of gothic and gothic-tinged metal and, unfortunately, MDB singer Aaron Stainthorpe often makes me shake my head at his, what seem to me to be, OTT gothic tendencies, sounding sometimes like he has eaten a full set of Anne Rice novels and washed them down with a collection of Byron's poetry! Contrary to appearances otherwise, I don't hate My Dying Bride, far from it, but I just wish they would rein it in a bit sometimes.

So I decided to go back to MDB's debut full-length in the hopes of rekindling some of that affection I had for them a couple of decades ago now.  I welcome the fact that the album lacks a lot of the overt gothicness (gothicicity?) of a lot of their later material and has quite a raw production. I think it safe to file this under death doom rather than gothic death doom and it even dallies with out and out death metal in places, The Forever People, for example. The more epic tracks such as Sear Me and The Return of the Beautiful, whilst bearing a similar structure to later epics, don't become bogged down by excess gothic window dressing and so retain a vitality and immediacy that a lot of MDB's more grandiose stuff just doesn't possess. They sound like a much more interesting prospect with this stripped-back production style and despite the sparseness of the production they still manage to sound gloriously melancholic. It is as if without all the technical shenanigans and enhanced studio techniques they have to rely more heavily on good, old-fashioned musical ability and songwriting. Generally Stainthorpe sticks to a gruff death metal growl and thankfully we don't get much of the laconic, world-weary vocal style he resorts to in later works that is always guaranteed to wind me up. The guitar riffs are thick and heavy and carry most of the album with their melancholy melodicism and intermittent bursts of aggression. The violin is employed on much rarer occasions than during your average, later MDB album and so is more effective when it does make it's presence felt.

Overall I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I might and this rawer side of My Dying Bride is something I would have loved to have heard more of. I guess this is not a popular opinion, but this is right up there as one of my favourite MDB albums.