(Andy Synn tries to separate the certain from the uncertain once and for all with the new Dream Unending album)

It’s well-documented by this point that I’m not a big fan of the often unnecessary and frequently misleading excesses of the online hype machine.

Not only can it do more harm than good by setting an unreasonably high standard (especially for new bands being presented as “the next big thing” before they’re ready) but it also makes it hard to have a measured and nuanced conversation about the merits, or mis-steps, of a piece of work when people are conditioned to see everything on a binary, black and white scale of either “best thing ever” or “complete and utter garbage fire.”

Case in point, the debut album from Justin DeTore and Derrick Vella, aka Dream Unending, was initially presented as a paradigm-shift in the medium of Death Doom, despite (in my opinion, at least) how obviously and heavily indebted it was to the earliest works of the seminal “Peaceville Three”… but any suggestion that it might not be the genre-defying game-changer it was presented as received a very hostile response.

And, to be clear, it’s not a bad record (even if 2022’s Song of Salvation, which you can read more about here, was significantly stronger) it’s just a prime example of an album where the initial hype represented a clear attempt to set and control the narrative in a way that wasn’t fully reflected by the release itself.

But, for whatever reason – maybe it’s because they’re no longer the hip, new thing, or maybe it’s just because the band’s third album is a more daring, harder to definte piece of work – there doesn’t seem to have been quite as much hype about Certain Uncertainties… which actually leaves a lot more room for me to talk about it.

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