Review by Ben for My Dying Bride - The Thrash of Naked Limbs (1993)

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.