review: Mourn The Light / Oxblood Forge

Mourn The Light / Oxblood Forge

Mourn The Light / Oxblood Forge

13 September 2019

In this case both bands share a commonality of interests. They both play a particular form of traditional style of doom that insistently incorporates the rocking element, as if they were saying that they (1) love doom and traditional heavy metal as equally and feel no need to separate them, and (2) they don’t want to be slow-all-the-time, put-you-to-sleep doom monotony. Mourn the Light is traditional heavy metal/doom with melodic male midrange singing. The vocals are not too high, and the melodic aspect is not very developed as of yet, but the overall voice is pleasant.

The music fluctuates between those big slow riffs and the uptempo riffs that pick up the pace for headbanging. In addition to two songs of the doom/heavy metal style, they have a requiem of keyboards (they say that it is piano, actually) and vocals. This is a totally different and great side of the music, but unfortunately it seems they needed a guest for the piano. If someone in the band were able to play piano, the band would show another dimension to their music and could it a lot more as part of their identity. The band also tags on a cover of Candlemass’ “Bewitched.” It’s a good cover. Take it or leave it. It doesn’t take away anything from the band’s own material.

The other band is Oxblood Forge. They are a doomy type of heavy metal, but the music sounds good for headbanging, and it’s not shoe gazing doom. The vocals need some description. The vocals sound like a screamed-type of style but it is substantially comprehensible. It is not really unpleasant nor is it particularly harsh, but it is a screaming voice, and not a singing one. Actually, they do have singing, too; a pretty melodic voice, but they do both the screamed-out voice and the singing as their thing. In the case of Oxblood Forge, potential listeners will need to check out the two types of vocals and see what they think about it all.

To sum up, both bands offer a more rocking style of doom, as opposed to pure doom of slow tunes all the time. In fact, Oxblood Forge is less doom and way more heavy metal in spirit.

mournthelight.bandcamp.com/album/death-is-lurking

oxbloodforge.bandcamp.com/album/screams-from-silence-forged-in-fire