Band:	Shores Of Null
Album:	Beyond The Shores (On Death And Dying)
Style:	Blackened doom metal, Gothic doom metal
Release date:	November 2020

01. Beyond The Shores (On Death And Dying)

An Italian melancholic doom single-track album with guests from Saturnus and Swallow The Sun. Let's get it!

I've done a pretty hard job for myself considering that most of the interesting things about the album I've already stated in the attention grabber. Shores Of Null is a doom band, with bits of influences from death and black metal, but mostly ticking in melodic gothic doom territories, especially on this record. Thing something in the vein of their countrymen in Novembre (whose singer actually guested on the previous record). I first got to know them through the vocalist Davide Straccione, who regularly guested on Methadone Skies albums. And this album has some high profile guests too. You'll hear the word guest a lot. This album has four guest vocalists, and I feel kinda weird that I only know the two male ones, the vocalists from the two aforementioned big name bands.

Sure, Beyond The Shores (On Death And Dying) isn't drowned in doom royalty the way that Tomorrow's Rain's Holow was (though they share Mikko), but having the two that they do is no small feat (get it? "feat"? Because they're featured?), and with a single track approach allows them to be integrated much better inside a whole instead of relying on their star power. With the four extra vocalists in the single song in the span of slightly less than forty minutes, it does have a bit of a character-driven feel without going full Ayreon-core. Mostly the album really required an extra way to expand its emotional range, especially due to its concept (more on that in a minute), so having multiple vocalists with familiar but somewhat diverging approaches works.

Beyond The Shores (On Death And Dying) is centered around the five stages of grief, which is probably not the first time a metal band has used this concept, but Shores Of Null do it justice with their most intricate and brooding work to date. Besides the aforementioned guest vocalists, a lot of extra strings and pianos are played (now in the flesh) to ooze the record in a bit of a melodramatic orchestral feeling. Giving more extra strings of the metal kind is Marco Mastrobuono of Hour Of Penance, who programmed the strings on the previous record and produced this one. At its 38 minutes, Beyond The Shores (On Death And Dying) manages to avoid feeling artificially stitched together or elongated, with its sense of ebb and flow keeping it from ever losing its momentum and grandiose emotional impact.

As much as I wouldn't have minded a bit more of the previous records' black metal touches, Beyond The Shores (On Death And Dying) has plenty to replace them with. It is ambition that paid off, not only overcoming their previous records, but being a prime listen for the genre as a whole.