2017 | Funeral Doom Metal
✩✩✩✩✩ | 4.5/5
Tracklist:
Mirror Reaper
To the uninitiated, the prospect of listening to a single 83-minute song may seem daunting. But to those that have listened- and I mean really listened- Mirror Reaper presents an uncompromisingly desolate and grief-stricken listen, with an unparalleled atmosphere thick with despair. Its length may at first seem to be a gimmick, but it is well utilized and fully justified, driving home the album's grandeur and immensity.
Depending on which definition of “heavy” you use, this may be the "heaviest" album I’ve ever heard. Sure, there are plenty of albums and whole genres whose instrumentation is more aggressive, which have more crushing riffs, whose drums are more powerful. If Suffocation are a pummeling assault via blunt force trauma, their drums relentless, their riffs brutal and uncompromising. And if Neurosis are cannon fire; explosive and sudden, with enough force to collapse your lungs and pulverize your bones, how could Bell Witch possibly get heavier? Mirror Reaper (and in fairness, Funeral Doom at large) is not heavy because of pure aggression or instrumental density and speed- according to that definition there is hardly an individual moment on here that is as heavy as “Enter Sandman”. To use an analogy as I did above: Mirror Reaper is force itself; it’s gravity, it’s a constant, slow, ever-present weight. Mirror Reaper is heavy in such a way that it weighs on your conscience as you listen, it pulls at your soul. The album captures the feeling of falling, both in a physical and metaphorical sense. The pacing, intensity, and darkness feel like the soundtrack to a lengthy fall through the center of the earth, as pressure mounts and heat intensifies. While the highly emotional instrumentation perfectly recalls the feeling of having the ground beneath you yanked away.
Prior to 2016, Bell Witch were a duo out of Seattle, Washington, with Dylan Desmond on bass guitar and Adrian Guerra on drums. They had released two quite excellent records- Longing (2012) and Four Phantoms (2015)- prior to Guerra’s departure from the band, and his subsequent death from the health complications he had left the band for. After bringing on Jesse Shreibman to play drums, Desmond continued on to record Mirror Reaper as a tribute to Guerra, taking parts of what he and Guerra had been working on before his death as its basis. As the name suggests, Funeral Doom Metal tends to reflect feelings of loss and grief, and Mirror Reaper does this better than any other Funeral Doom record I’ve heard, due in part to the circumstances under which it was recorded.
Composed entirely of drums, vocals, bass, and organ (notably no guitar) Mirror Reaper manages to do what some would think to be impossible… make an hour and a half long song both enjoyable and engaging. Mirror Reaper is an exercise in indulgence, like the wailing of a soul whose pent-up despair has been finally let loose. The album manages to be both beautiful and ugly simultaneously, with thick, blood curdling bass lines and growled vocals pairing with melodic bass leads and haunting organ. The album starts with an enthrallingly dark, melodic, and beautiful clean bass section, and the moment when 2-3 minutes in the distortion suddenly kicks in has made me nearly fall over more than once. At about 30 minutes in the song hits a partial climax, where the tension of the first 10-15 minutes pair up with the ambiance and atmosphere of the following 10 minutes to be released in these absolutely feral vocals pulled from previous recordings Bell Witch had made with Guerra. From this point the album begins to truly hit its stride, where you lose track of time, where it becomes hard to focus and to remember the individual movements of the song. I’ve nearly been brought to tears several times by several different parts of this song, including once while re-listening to the album to write this review.
I love Funeral Doom as a genre, truly. But Mirror Reaper is maybe the only album in the genre that I’ve heard which actually fulfills on the promise that the genre makes. Mirror Reaper consumes my consciousness and changes my entire mindset every time I put it on. No other album can achieve this feeling. While most Funeral Doom albums are ostensibly about loss and despair, none of them, not Ahab, not Funeral, not Evoken, not Esoteric, not previous or subsequent Bell Witch albums, can make me feel like Mirror Reaper can.
Mirror Reaper is certainly not the greatest album of all time, and it demands a certain patience and mindset to be enjoyed. I emphasized in the beginning that you can listen to this album, and you can ‘REALLY listen’ to this album, because unlike most other music which you safely assume can be enjoyed and consumed under most circumstances, Mirror Reaper demands a certain dedication of time and attention. Outside of these criteria, the album is too slow, too reliant on “atmosphere” without focusing enough on much melodic, harmonic, or rhythmic identity. Outside of these circumstances the album is too long, the vocals largely indecipherable, and the instrumentation too sparse and slow. But within these circumstances, when given the time, thought, and patience it deserves, and knowing the context of the band and what went into recording Mirror Reaper, it is something wholly unique, completely engrossing, emotionally powerful, and absolutely crushing in its heaviness.
Post Script
Since writing this review nearly a year ago, Bell Witch have actually released a new version of Mirror Reaper, adding new intros and outros to split the track into 4 parts. If 83 minutes is understandably too long, then give "Movement Two" a try.
And if you're going for the full listen, put on some proper headphones, turn off mono audio, and dig into something monotonous. You won't regret it.
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