Band:	My Dying Bride
Album:	The Light At The End Of The World
Style:	Death doom metal, Gothic doom metal
Release date:	October 12, 1999
A review by:	Deadsoulman

01. She Is The Dark
02. Edenbeast
03. The Night He Died
04. The Light At The End Of The World
05. The Fever Sea
06. Into The Lake Of Ghosts
07. The Isis Script
08. Christliar
09. Sear Me III

After the semi-failure (commercial but not artistic in my opinion) of "34.788 Complete", which had made them lose a huge part of their die-hard fans, the great English doom band has decided to come back to its roots... and has released this "The light at the end of the world", that is seen as a step backwards by most of metallers. An impression confirmed by the departure of the guitarist Calvin Robertshaw who had been the only one to support the last album.

So they have come back to their fist love, I mean to gothic death metal: there is an alternance between slow rhythms and fast death metal riffs, and even the singer uses his black-death voice he had abandoned since "As the flower withers" and "Turn loose the Swans". The only thing that has not changed is the ability of My Dying Bride to create dark and doom atmospheres expressed by the few apparitions of the violin, the keyboards that stand discreet but are really present behind the other instruments, and also by the melancholy of the singer. He seems to live in a world of misery and suicide in which desperation is dripping...

Aaron Stainthorpe's lyrics deal as usual with "beautiful" topics such as love, passion (that always end up bad) and death. They are still miserable -as the band loves to say- and added to the music they give the impression that there is no salvation possible for us... For example, the song "The light at the end of the world" tells the story of a man whose wife the gods have killed and that is given the chance to see her again for one night if he accepts to be the keeper of the gods' lighthouse eternally; for 50 years the man lives through the memory of his beloved, but when he gets bored and decides to suicide, he realizes he's already dead and lives as an angel, so that he really will have to keep the light at the end of the world forever... Very poetic but above all very depressing. And the whole album is in this tone, stories of murder, revenge, damnation...

Finally this album may be the best My Dying Bride's one, but it's a shame some calm moments are not at the level of the rest: "The light at the end of the world" has beautiful lyrics but the song is boring, and "Christliar"'s beginning is only bad, whereas the end of this song is the best moment of the album... On the other hand it has to be said that the death metal passages are all very violent, very fast and very good.

We finally can notice that this album contains the most violent track they ever released "The fever sea", that most true death-metal bands wouldn't have denied.

Highlights: She Is The Dark, The Fever Sea, Christliar