Review by Rexorcist for My Dying Bride - The Dreadful Hours (2001)

Length is a very touchy thing for me when it comes to music. The biggest part of that for me in the world of metal may either be drone or doom, because we have plenty of doom styles that are so drawn out and build themselves on creating an aura with the same riff going on for a couple to several minutes.  The way I see it: atmosphere is a journey into new worlds, so don't stop at one world for too long.  Entire albums made up of these songs tend to be problematic across review boards, and I myself admit to being more annoyed by it than I should.  But doom metal has its legends, and some of them really know how to keep things out there and inventive.  IMO, the greatest musicians of all time should be able to accomplish a number of musical achievements, and not do the same thing over and over again.  In this instance, that band is My Dying Bride, a gothic doom band for Type O negative fans, but better.

The Dreadful Hours sees the band maturing and improving on the tame atmospheres they created with their past albums and making it a whirlpool of deeper emotion rather than just a dark frolic through cool riffs.  They've done some fantastic albums before, but this took the cake.  There's this incredibly careful shift from sadness to anger, and hatred to romance that overtakes the whole album.  Through this, we're able to resonate with the sadness from a number of entry points.  It helps that while each song is around six to ten minutes, our riffs are catchy whether they're fast or slow, and that combination of doom, death, goth and post switches focal points every couple minutes while keeping the themes intact.  And this album makes the gloomy sound feel effortless.  Compare an average dark and classic metal album to this one.  Other brilliant albums may usually make it look like they put in effort, but My Dying Bride made it look easy.

This is one of those doom albums that recreates a number of forms of anger and sadness, like a good Nick Cave album.  As such, The Dreadful hours is currently my favorite doom and gothic album.  This is a mournful hour that never lets down on the imagination factor, which means nothing loses focus when creating a metal atmosphere.  There isn't even another MDB album that comes close to this for me, not even the other five stars.