Four Phantoms is unspeakably sad, an extended lament so vast and panoramic that it seems more like an expression of bereavement for the loss of an entire race than for that of an individual soul. Yet it is also sublime, as if Bell Witch had swum endless fathoms down beneath an ocean of grief, down to the pristine alabaster core of human loss resting in the blackness, and surfaced again to erect it like a monument, gleaming with cold light under a half moon.

You’ll have to forgive me for these flights of verbal grandiosity (there will be more to come). The music is the kind that carries your imagination away. It induces introspectiveness. Its emotional impact is profound. In my case, it makes me search hard for words that are grand enough to suit the music; I’m sure I’ll fail, but it’s too late for you to stop me from trying.

The music is slow, spare, and seemingly simple. There are probably more notes and beats in a few measures of tech-death frenzy than in an entire song on Four Phantoms — and of those four songs, two are more than 10 minutes in length and two last more than 22 minutes. But what Bell Witch do with their seemingly simple tools is to build something exalted, yet with a weight that’s almost too much to bear. Continue reading »

So much of the metal I listen to is so fast and furious that when I dived into Longing, the debut album by Seattle’s Bell Witch, I felt like a sprinter who’d been dropped in his tracks, as if the gravitational pull of the Earth had suddenly been quintupled. The pace of this tremendously heavy music is far slower than the beat of a human heart, yet a heart beats within it, as the songs push and pull between the sounds of devastation and salvation.

Longing is an apt title for this album. Its six atmospheric tracks create an uncanny ambience of loss and despair, a sense of isolation and depressive wistfulness, and often the feeling of unavoidable catastrophe and even horror. Yet the dark and brutal hopelessness of the songs is offset by slow, beautiful melodies — not cheerful ones, mind you, but profound expressions of melancholy.

The music is amazingly simple and spare. The only instruments employed by the Bell Witch duo of Dylan Desmond and Adrian Guerra are bass and drums (respectively), and their voices. I assume the bass is a six-string instrument, because those aching melodies are often carried by notes that climb up the register, often free of the massive distortion that surrounds the cave-in chords at the bottom of every song.

Two of the tracks — and they are the shortest ones — consist of no instruments but the bass, and no vocals. In “Beneath the Mask”, slow, reverberating notes and chords provide grim accompaniment for a sample from the Roger Corman 1964 horror classic Masque of the Red Death, in which the Satan-worshipper Prince Prospero discovers the identity of the Man in Red. The final track, “Outro”, is simply a bass solo — ponderous, booming, yet still woven with bleak melody. Continue reading »