Bereft – Leichenhaus (The End Records)
It’s pretty hard not to know what to expect when a band with a name like Bereft pops up in the review pile. Slightly less obvious an aesthetic indicator is their album’s title, a reference to ancient German practices of placing a recently deceased body in a room for several days before burial to cut down on the messy business of burying people alive. So with those two elements in place, it’s pretty safe to assume that the album won’t sound like butterfly kisses and rainbow cupcakes (whatever either of those sounds like). And Bereft doesn’t disappoint, offering a debut that’s as heavy and dark as its title would suggest while executing it competently enough that it side-steps some of the more obvious cliché that this sort of album can fall into.
Bereft – Leichenhaus (The End Records)
It’s pretty hard not to know what to expect when a band with a name like Bereft pops up in the review pile. Slightly less obvious an aesthetic indicator is their album’s title, a reference to ancient German practices of placing a recently deceased body in a room for several days before burial to cut down on the messy business of burying people alive. So with those two elements in place, it’s pretty safe to assume that the album won’t sound like butterfly kisses and rainbow cupcakes (whatever either of those sounds like). And Bereft doesn’t disappoint, offering a debut that’s as heavy and dark as its title would suggest while executing it competently enough that it side-steps some of the more obvious cliché that this sort of album can fall into.
The band was intended to be a funeral doom side project featuring members of Intronaut, the Faceless, and Abysmal Dawn, but their intentions don’t exactly shine through. There’s some of the funeral doom sub-subgenre’s emphasis on integrating mournful melodies with plodding heaviness, but most of the material on Leichenhaus plows along at a tempo considerably more lively than your average Skepticism clone. This isn’t to say it’s a fast album by any stretch of the imagination, but the slightly more vivacious feel (as much as anything ascribing to be part of a genre with “funeral” in the name could be said to be vivacious) does the material a world of good. It’s not that the songs are poorly constructed, but if they were much slower or longer, they may not have come off as bracing as they did.
Because Bereft aren’t really doing anything that hasn’t been done before, the small things – the pacing, the melody, the use of subtle electronic elements – add up to help prevent the album from becoming stale. It’s not that these facets of their sound even necessarily render them wholly original, but they all work, and that’s generally what a listener gets from this album. It’s a very utilitarian metal album: it gets in, it does its job in a satisfactory fashion, and it’s done without lingering too long. Leichenhaus exists just far enough outside the periphery of expectations that it works. It may not blow minds, but it won’t disappoint either.
