Sorrowful Land - Of Ruins… (CD)

Review
Metal Injection
11.11.2016

It’s the weekend! What better way to get it started than with the latest installment of “Funeral Doom Friday”. This weekly column looks to shed some light onto some of the darkest, most depressing, and discordant metal out there. Funeral Doom stems from the deepest depths of Death-Doom and Dirge music. Each week, the goal is to highlight some of the newest music or rediscover classic works from some of the earliest bands and originators such as Australia’s Mournful Congregation, United States’s Evoken, UK’s Esoteric and the Finnish Thergothon. Feel free to share your opinions and suggestions in the comments!

sorrowful-land-of-ruins

Funeral Doom Friday sets its sights on Ukraine this week. Sorrowful Land is a one-man project from the city of Kharkov that was founded back in the spring of 2014. Initially, a duo of musicians, Max Molodtsov and Peter Laustsen worked together to release a demo track later that year. That track, “On Another’s Sorrow”, would be the only product of the duo’s efforts. Laustsen left Sorrowful Land in the early months of this year, leaving Molodtsov to construct the band’s music on his own. The results of his efforts have culminated in today’s feature, Of Ruins… The debut full-length album saw its release this week through Solitude Productions.

–– ADVERTISEMENT ––

No Clean Singing premiered and reviewed the album last week, providing a wonderful analysis about Of Ruins… In an effort to heap additional praise onto the album, Molodtsov’s channeling of current and former funerary greats is top-notch. Take this understood precedence of greatness and combine it with his work in gothic doom band, Edenian, and lyrical content built out 19th-century English poetry, and the end result is a wonderfully evocative piece of Atmospheric/Funeral Doom Metal. Comparisons have been drawn to Finnish legends Skepticism as well as Shape of Despair, but much can be said of a link between Of Ruins… and the music of United Kingdom greats, Esoteric.

Parallels exist between vocal styling and guitar melodies when comparing Sorrowful Land to the English titans. Molodstov and Esoteric’s Greg Chandler employ similar bellows. As for the guitar melodies, they evolve into punishing walls of lament. The former demo track, “On Another’s Sorrow” as well as the title track and album closer, “Echoes of Endless Silence” are all solid showcases for this. Molodstov’s appreciation of the inherent balance within Funeral Doom is strongest in his guitars. The threnody that radiates from sullen, stringed ambiance and the towering riffs come from the same stringed instruments and recesses of Max’s mind.

It is a late edition to the discussion for 2016’s best examples of Funeral Doom, but it pleads a worthy case. Check out the album below. For those that are interested, digital copies of Sorrowful Land’s debut album are available through the project’s Bandcamp page ($4.99) while physical copies are available through Solitude Productions ($10.) Make sure to follow Sorrowful Land on Facebook as well for all of Max’s major updates and Solitude Productions’ Facebook for similar releases from the past or in the future! Feel free to comment with your thoughts and future column suggestions at the bottom.

Author: CODY DAVIS

Review
Doom-Metal.com
6/10
21.11.2016

This six-song, fifty-minute, effort from multi-instrumentalist Max Molodtsov (also of the band Edenian – who I’m not familiar with), establishes its referents and emotional agenda from the off. Steeped in early Anathema, My Dying Bride, Mourning Beloveth, Saturnus (…ad infinitum…), the soundscape is lush and drearily melodic, underpinned by simple down-tuned riffing and tasteful piano and orchestration. Tearful lead-lines dripping with reverb and sustain soar over the rain-soaked arrangements and vocals which alternate between whispered spoken passages and a harsh guttural roar (the lyrics are apparently a mixture of English romantic poetry and Molodtsov’s own compositions; they are apt and well-chosen, though for the most part indecipherable). The fundamentals are sound: arrangements are hard to fault and the balance of textures is well judged; the production – though perhaps a little lifeless and synthetic – is clear and professional sounding. The overall atmosphere – of listless sorrow, regret and decay – is convincingly actualised; instrumentation is competent, although the drums, alas, are synthesised, and the snare sound is of the ‘whacking-the-biscuit-tin’ variety. That aside, nothing here is inept or offensive to the ear, the obvious influences seamlessly synthesized and redeployed.

Sadly, that is as far as it goes. I have listened to this record a number of times from start to finish. I am listening to it again as I write. Not once has a single riff or melodic idea intruded itself into my consciousness and commanded attention – quite the opposite in fact. Despite repeated listens I still couldn’t tell you much about track 5 (‘Time of Tyrants’) or track 6 (‘Echoes of Endless Silence’) – not because these songs are bad, far from it, but because each time I try to pay attention, my mind wanders away around halfway through the album; my brain simply refuses to accept the data.

Imagine, if you would, a substantial grey stone manor house, with austere, neo-classical façade and its high leaded windows look out onto a swathe of landscaped gardens – once immaculate in their facsimile of a sublime romantic ideal, now long overgrown, turning wild and unkempt from a hundred years of neglect.

You sit inside by a ground floor window, gazing out at the encroaching ivy and marauding rhodedendrons, washed out to colourless torpor under a flat grey cloud that stretches to eternity. A gentle rain drums against the glass – the only sound. You turn from the window to the room behind you. Dust gathers in the empty corners of the room, piling into little dunes on the bare floorboards. The room is bare, stripped of furnishings, dark oblong patches on the walls where pictures once hung. The limestone fireplace remains in place, elegantly sculpted and corbelled, but no fire has burned in its grate for a century.

You get up and begin to walk through the house, passing from room to room like a searching ghost; every space is alike: dust, shadows, emptiness, silence.

And as you wander you realise that within the fragile beauty, the sadness, the ruin, the solitude and the futility there lies something else: a terrible, wearisome ennui.

You are – you suddenly realise – mind-numbingly, soul-crushingly bored.

Thus it is with ‘Of Ruins…’. For all that its atmospheres are evocative and well-constructed – immersive, even – there is no getting away from the conclusion that, in final analysis, the whole thing – including all that atmospheric weight – is simply enervating. This makes it a difficult album to review, as the record largely succeeds on its own terms, and I daresay that some may object to my assessment of it. Ultimately, however, there is little here that would move me to return to it in the future, just as there is nothing about it that will coach my carcass out of the armchair to go and turn it off. It is not in any way bad, but neither is it anything more than the sum of its influences. I have the feeling that with bravery and determination, Molodtsov could turn out an album of genuine power and artistic depth. Of Ruins… is not that album. Not quite.

Author: Tom Williams

Review
Iye Zine
7.9/10
23.11.2016

Avevamo già potuto apprezzare il talento compositivo di Max Molodtsov in occasione delle due uscite del 2014 targate Edenian, dove con il nickname di Eternal Tom si cimentava in un gothic doom con tanto di voce femminile, sulla scia dei Draconian.

Con questo suo progetto solista, il musicista ucraino può dare sfogo ad un’indole che lo porta ad avvicinare il death doom di matrice svedese, in scia ai When Nothing Remains (non a caso Peter Laustsen fa capolino in On Another’s Sorrow) e i Doom Vs. di quel Johan Ericson che, per Molodtsov, costituisce sicuramente un modello dal punto di vista chitarristico, vista la notevole affinità di tocco già evidenziata nei lavori degli Edenian.
Con questi riferimenti e le già riconosciute doti tecniche di prim’ordine da mettere sul piatto, era fin troppo facile prevedere la riuscita di quest’esordio dei Sorrowful Land: grandi melodie, splendido lavoro chitarristico, vocals convincenti ed atmosfere pregne di dolente malinconia, nulla che non vada, insomma.
Se proprio vogliamo trovare il classico pelo nell’uovo, Of Ruins … in certi tratti potrebbe davvero essere scambiato per un nuovo album dei When Nothing Remains, ma alla fine chi se ne importa, quando nel lettore scorrono cinquanta minuti di death doom melodico di prima qualità: noi appassionati del genere chiediamo essenzialmente ai musicisti di emozionarci, e lasciamo volentieri la ricerca della pietra filosofale (sotto forma di originalità) a chi possiede menti meno semplici e lineari delle nostre …
Con gli indizi che ho fornito mi pare superfluo spiegare ulteriormente i contenuti del lavoro: chi ama le band citate si immerga senza indugio nell’ascolto dei brani grondanti emozioni contenuti in Of Ruins …

Author: STEFANO CAVANNA

Review
Terra Relicta
10/10
27.11.2016

Welcome to an epic doomy journey! First of all I must say that lately I’ve been on a slight doom metal ride and Sorrowful Land with this magnificient album named Of Ruins… just came to me in the right time, and what an amazing record they have built up. It’s hard to put together a good resume of how to describe the album. The production reminds me of Doom:VS 2008′ album Dead Words Speak, it has that similar sort of muddy guitar sound with loads of beautiful keys in the background which creates the right vibe of the album. Songs are raging from more traditonal doom metal to a pure funeral doom. The band is hailing form Ukraine, a country which is not really known for doom bands, but it’s more than great to see that they have promising acts there.

I love the mix between clean and growling vocals, that has always been something I’ve enjoyed in doom metal. Crushing, highly melodic, yet dark and deep, the band marches forward slowly and steady. They are building up one hell of a really nice energy around itself, like a wall of fragile and elegant sounds. With beautiful clean melodies and a clear idea where things are heading the band presents six tracks of pure crushing epic melancholic doom, and believe me if you are fan of gloomy doom that this is everything you could ever want from a doom metal album, really, this record is a pure pile of gold for all doom metal fans. The songs tend to stick to very typical slow doom tempo, but still there’s more than enough going on that you would ever expect, for example the small fills and tom rolls, and not necessarily sticking to the traditonal doom metal structure, just listen for example to grandiose epic “On Another’s Sorrow” to get an idea. Sometimes the sound reminds me slightly to early Katatonia or Hamferå, the guitar work is impressively tight and is leaving room for plenty of nice guitar harmonies and melodic lines, while the drums are slowly pounding and back up everything so nicely.

The more I listen to it the more I get dragged into the depths of this magic album, while the songs are fairly long, they offer just enough of diversity and I can almost want them to be even longer. It’s harsh enough, and melodic yet stunningly beautiful! Even if this is their first album, Sorrowful Land will clearly left a mark in the scene for sure with this stunning release.

Author: Oliver

Review
Winter Torment webzine
27.11.2016

Coming out of the Ukraine is atmospheric death/doom Sorrowful Land with their debut CD. Sorrowful Land play a very mature style of atmospheric death/doom, the guitars are well written and performed with mainly slow heavy guitar patterns and riffs.The drums are done with some precise and well arranged, drum patterns that are mainly in the slower vein but do go for a mid-paced style in a few songs. The vocalist does a good job with both death metal growls and some spoken clean vocals used throughout a few songs. If you are a fan of atmospheric death/doom then be sure to pick up Sorrowful Land’s debut “Of Ruins…” today.

Author: Patrick