Baltimore & Brenner trilogy, part
III: Shush!
The
early 1990s weren't the perfect era for traditional doom, it was
considered a sort of regressive music and it wasn't heavy enough to
compete with the uprising of death metal and the groovy proto-nu
metal of Pantera. Doom was also getting extreme with bands like
Eyehategod so, trad doom
didn't have a lot of place and was confined to the underground even
though classic top notch material was released (such as Iron Man's
Black Night, the
Obsessed's Lunar Womb or
anything Count Raven did) still bands like Cathedral made it but
times were dark for the genre.
Revelation are one of those bands
deserving of a better place in metal's history because of the sheer
quality of their music. Despite changing the creative core of the
lineup after this album, the band stayed pertinent with ...yet
So Far. Never Comes Silence was
then the last album under the leadership of John Brenner before the
reformation in 2007 with a new lineup
(the exact same dudes as Against Nature) and
it's perhaps the band's finest hour (well more like 70 minutes, to be
exact).
The
only difference in the lineup is the presence of Josh Hart (bass) and
he's as incredible but a bit more subdued than the current bassist
Bert Hall Jr. Musicianship is important in doom even though it's
neither complex, fast or “technical”, it's
all about creating interesting atmospheres with
a limited yet sufficient instrumentation.
It's a trio with the usual metal or rock instruments and with their
talented skills and it works
fine. Brenner's solos are tremendous and very well written such as
the ones in “Spectre” or “Ashes”, they're
not a very heavy band even for trad doom standards but the riffs are
here and they're all pretty good.
The
songs are mostly long, emotional and slow. While they can speed
things up, it stays morose
and sad. They're definitely a precursor to the emotional side of doom
metal found in bands like Warning. Revelation's
lyrics are introspective and
personal, something admittedly quite different from what their
contemporary peers were doing and while I prefer some fancy evil or
mythological subjects, it fits their music like a glove.
“How
thin the walls which seal my mind / How close the final episode of
apathy”
“What
do I see in visions discreet / Futures unseen, paths not meant to be”
The
progressive elements are quite subtle here, it's more in the way that
songs are composed and played
that they're different than their peers. It's not that obvious when
you're not quite familiar with the doom genre but for me, the song
structures and the type of riffs used are not
owing everything to Black Sabbath like it's the case for Saint Vitus
or Pentagram. Revelation plays a
very smooth sort of doom and they owe a lot to Rush too. The pièce
de résistance of this album
is the eighteen minutes title track at the end and you can definitely
hear the 70s Rush influences (think Caress of Steel) there.
Nonetheless, don't make the
mistake to compare it to Dream Theater's seminal classic Images
and Words, released the same
year as it's nowhere near the
same kind
of progressive metal.
Revelation explores a sort of lo-fi, simple yet evocative doom.
Never Comes Silence is
an underrated classic in dire need of more recognition. It's still
relevant today as it was innovative for its period with the way they
merged sophisticated but restrained progressive influences with a
refined, sentimental yet riffy, melodic
and profound approach to
traditional doom metal.
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