Music review: My Dying Bride - Turn Loose the Swans (1993)

Perhaps the least accessible member of the Peaceville trio (too metal for goths and too gothic for metalheads) and Turn Loose the Swans their least accessible release due to its transitional sound requiring some patience.

Someone listening to the two surrounding LPs would easily get it: unlike its predecessor As the Flower Withers, the gothic elements are turned to 11 but most importantly accompanied by new clean vocals and sometimes "extracted" into segments very reminiscent of Spleen and Ideal era Dead Can Dance. The result is less seamless by definition but for many reasons objectively better.

Some of these many reasons are as follow:

• The average tempo is a lot slower and finally fits the picture they've been trying to paint since the beginning on their Symphonaire Infernus Et Spera Empyrium EP.
• The production is massively better: darker, heavier and somewhat subdued, once again much more suited to their atmospheric ambitions.
• Clearly linked to the previous two points, they finally stopped wavering between heaviness and lukewarm death metal brutality to focus on the former.
• Those clean vocals have a bleak/mournful quality that blends very well with the whole and helps tying it all together.

Really an altogether more coherent and qualitative effort. Compared to the almost-as-good successor, I think the aforementioned production is better and less tame/flat, making it more engaging.

Only one real flaw: it's way too long and not always gripping. The title track (last before the outro) felt especially superfluous and too similar to the ~30 minutes it follows.