Bell Witch – Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate

2023-05-16 08:41:34

by Oliver
am 16. May 2023
in Album, Heavy Rotation

The cooperation Stygian Bought Vol. I was the necessary step to the side to catch your breath and take a running start. Finally think Bell Witch Future’s Shadow, the follow-up project to their genre-celebrating (and aesthetically new era of metal, by the way) doom masterpiece Mirror Reaperalready with its first part – The Clandestine Gate – on an even larger scale.

Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate begins where Part 3 is planned to end – or, as a conceptual, cyclical Möbius strip, will not: as “composition that pulses and breathes on a filmic timeframe. It constitutes the first chapter in a planned triptych of longform albums, collectively called Future’s Shadow.‘ and as Dylan Desmond further elaborates: ‘Eventually, the end of the last album will be looped around to the first to make a circle. It can be continuously looped, like a day cycle. This would be dawn. The next one would be noon. The following one would be sundown, with dawn and sundown both having something of night.“
Strictly speaking, the dimensions have not only grown – alone Clandestine Gate is a single 85-minute mountain of compositions of at first intimidating (though in fact rarely challenging the limits of attention span) and ultimately as fulfilling majesty as they except Bell Witch only a damn few genre peers can create.

The basic conditions of the (depending on how you count all cooperations and demos) only the 22nd song that the duo from Seattle in their (the formative line-up change on the drums from Adrian Guerrera to Jesse Shreibman Four Phantoms 2015 disregarding) 13-year career spreads must certainly include the burden of Mirror Reaper as a consensus masterpiece of Funeral Doom (whether stylistically, structurally, aesthetically or otherwise), but in fact it rather cleverly builds on its framework and virtues: Bell Witch know best what is expected of them, their sound and the audience in terms of volume.
The differences too Mirror Reaper can be summed up in a compact way – Aerial Ruin did not get a place on board the journey this time, while the choral pastoral singing now accompanies large parts of the record, where the organ passages and synth surfaces also form the character of the music more dominantly than ever before – but their scope only gradually understand completely satisfactorily.

The sacred organ-sounding intro takes a long time The Clandestine Gate so time before the bass weaves over the reverent carpet like contemplatively oscillating post-rock guitars, and following nine minutes the drums awaken, the strings embracing such a typical, unmistakable melody of the band, which in its familiarity is subversively overwhelming : you already know something like that from Bell Witchonly the duo articulates this variation of their essence once more infinitely epic and longing, as if simply healing in its depressingly uplifting way, elevating the tragedy of beauty to a pedestal, and through the crushing, almost drone-reflective textures celebrates the songwriting and the architecture of the reef cascades is still rounder, softer and more expansive than before.
The atmosphere intensifies the depth effect with every meter, a clerical chant drives elegiacly through the massive sound, which evokes a downright ambient effect: Clandestine Gate belongs, to emphasize it explicitly at this point, to the best work that Billy Anderson (Engineer, Mixing) and Justin Weis (Mastering) in their careers, which were not lacking in high-class feats, in terms of sound technology.

After regarding 25 minutes, however, the meditative stream of mesmerizing heaviness tips into a reduced bass motif that muses in frightening maritime hopelessness, sliding ever lower down, enjoying the contemplative solitude in slow motion: not a second seems wasted or effortful here. Mystical, shimmering synths therefore only slowly flow back into the field of vision, which is characterized by darkness, showing the apathy of an occult, even downright cultic recitation: “I wanted the vocals to be more active, rather than being on top of the soundscape,” says Schreibman and bundles his voice with Desmond to clearer lines.
After around half an hour of play, The Clandestine Gate begins to grow once more in all the attributes that have defined Bell Witch in its sector for years, without buzzwords like monolithic or epic: it has a physique that creeps into every pore before the post-apocalyptic gorge stares into the abyss, guttural crushing towards death, the harmonic fields with malicious vehemence towards wonderful, endless heaviness, whose overwhelming grandeur, atmosphere and dynamics are pushed higher and higher by pleasant organ waves, truly monumental.

A horizon that might have stretched out forever – even if Bell Witch in their more smoothly celebrated territory, not quite the magic of those who can pull the rug out from under their feet Mirror Reaper– Reaching high points – which, however, suddenly reveals an imbalance in the pacing in the last 20 minutes of the record: where, in terms of the arc of suspense, the finale of The Clandestine Gate is reached, the band suddenly appends an organ appendix, which first takes the momentum out of the flow a little, and then too quickly (judging by the patience that each passage previously showed) back into a dreamy one Funeral Doom banter that’s quite grippingly more direct and immediate than previous areas, relying on catchy stringency to choose solemn redemption with trance-like tool bass hallucinations. But no matter how brilliant long stretches of the record are following the one-hour mark, standing on their own, they also seem too hastily forced in the context.
Whether an isolated assessment for this first part of the triptych Future Shadow Insofar as it makes sense at all, only the rest of the mammoth project or a look at the big picture will show – perhaps the sequencing of the (despite everything not appearing as piecemeal) Clandestine Gate appear even more conclusive in the overall work. If it doesn’t, you should still be able to live with it: Bell Witch have once once more impressively demonstrated their exceptional position in the genre.

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