Band:	My Dying Bride
Album:	34.788%... Complete
Style:	Gothic doom metal
Release date:	October 1998

01. The Whore, The Cook And The Mother
02. The Stance Of Evander Sinque
03. Der Überlebende
04. Heroin Chic
05. Apocalypse Woman
06. Base Level Erotica
07. Under Your Wings And Into Your Arms
08. Follower [Japanese bonus]

"Tell me that I'm a sinner... "

So here is the album that has made this famous English band lose a huge part of their first-hour fans... Paradoxically, it's the one that has made me know My Dying Bride. As I had never heard "The Angel and the Dark River" before, I absolutely couldn't be prejudiced against this new one, and I have been able to immerse in it objectively, something that unfortunately some of the fans did not do...
It is understandable that the complete change compared to "Like Gods of the Sun" has disgusted the doom fans: the main word here is experimentation. Well, of course some things never change. A My Dying Bride album wouldn't deserve this name if there were no violins, if the lyrics were not about sex and death and misery, if Stainthorpe's voice was not melancholic and (how could I say that?) nearly abnormal, if each track was not 10-minutes long... These things will last forever, on every new album. So the disorientation was not completely abrupt.

What has pushed fans off is maybe that there is no more doom metal here... Only the attitude and the atmosphere are doom. Then it sounds more like an experimental electro-stoner, with, most of the time, heavy and really slow riffs ("The stance of Evander Sinque", "Der Uberlebende"), a haunting and sick voice, strange backing vocals("Base Level Erotica"), and various weird noises (the four minutes break on the first track "The whore the cook and the mother") that create a filthy and desperate atmosphere. The climax of experimentation is reached with "Heroin chic", a song that is not, but really absolutely not, metal at all. It is some kind of acid-jazz but it has its place on the album... Not the best one (I couldn't listen to a whole album of that style), but a pretty good song, very disturbing.

Actually, only two tracks boost the speed of this album (the first adjective that comes to mind is slow): "Apocalypse Woman" with a very good bass playing, and the single (and the best track of the album in my opinion) "Under Your Wings and Into Your Arms" with its fast riff which is certainly the most "normal" song of the album. But as ever, you won't find any chorus on this opus... the originality of My Dying Bride partly comes from the fact that they don't write their albums in the linear way "verse-chorus-verse", but that they change everytime their rhythm. This is probably the reason why you always need several listenings before appreciating their music: it is not conventional.

To sum up, if you didn't like this album when it has been released, try again, it is worth doing it. If you don't know My Dying Bride, well, I don't know if I should advise you to get this one before "The Angeland the Dark River"... Maybe not, but yet if you are open-minded enough, you may like it, because this is a very good one. This is how you see if a band is a great band, when it is able to make good things in different styles My Dying Bride is definitely a great band.

Highlights: The Whore The Cook And The Mother, Apocalypse Woman, Under Your Wings And Into Your Arms