You know that ache that the best music can give you? That one that begins behind your ribcage and seeps into your guts and just swells until it forces itself out through your mouth in a chant or a cry or a fist pumping, headbanging yell? Half way through the first song ‘Laudabiliter’ and it’s there. That’s what Mael Mordha bring to the table. I’ve watched them grow musically from an odd doom band with real promise if incongruous MDB piano bits on their debut Cluain Tarbh, through the gathering of their huge song-writing and storytelling talents on Gealtacht Mael Mordha to the epic shackle bursting muscular identity that burst from their Mannanan opus of 2010. That was also where they proved once and for all that they are that rarity; a band that sounds quite unlike anyone else. Influences, yes of course, but the sound they have forged, moulded and hammered from them is all their own.
Mael Mordha, muscular as their black bull, bring a huge thunder of doom to the epic folk and dramatic vocals that drag history from the past and into the very air you breathe. As compulsive and obsessed storytellers as Turisas but with a far darker, denser sound. The sound of pipes and horns, the careful use of death vocals, the smooth shift from Irish doom to the galloping charge of blood, fire and Bathory and such an ability paint pictures with this sound that the figures fight and die before your eyes. The vocals are always dramatic but expressive, often with more than a hint of early Borknagar in the vibrato and rise and fall. Follow not just the rolling sea born riff on ‘King Of The English’ but the history of alliances born of ambition and the rhythm of the words and you find yourself wrapped in a compelling history and a real game of thrones and the consequences.
‘Dawning Of The Grey’ rides a storm. ‘All Eire Will Quake’ is a grim, brutal warning of no retreat and the consequences of assumptions, with a chorus that vibrates with anger, making the words bounce around and slam into you. Once more it’s the seamless transition from slower doom to raw knuckle and epic metal riffs that drags you in, and the drama that keeps you there. And speaking of drama there’s the tale of ‘Bloody Alice (of Abergavenny)’ to contend with, a lady of character to be sure (and a large axe); it’s a real head-rush of a song, great use of the pipes and a pounding riff and handled in a manner that threatens to crush your windpipe if you dare treat it lightly. If it wasn’t for the next song it would be my favourite on the album
‘The Sacking Of Vedrafjord’, that song, simply reeks of slaughter and has a guitar break that Thin Lizzy would have enjoyed, though seated in an up-tempo doom framework: Thunder and sharp edges from the guitar like the charge of foot soldiers, flames licking the edges and the narrator our camera panning over the carnage. ‘A Dirge’ is just that, leading into the full blown doom of the closing title track, a slow but epic coda to a rather magnificent album of bloody red history, heroism, madness and treachery and intense Irish pride. The voices swell up into a chest filling rush of emotion, the song pitches headlong into a final tale of loss, of dislocation and we are done.
Mael Mordha have, with Damned When Dead, settled into the space cleared by the more bombastic but (just) slightly less mature Manannan. Song-writing has coalesced, the production lets the music talk and we have the kind of band that should be embraced by fans of everyone from Solstice through Primordial and Borknagar to Turisas and all points in between. They sound like a band eight feet tall and built like bears, their musical hand stretches out over a land’s history to show seas in red crested turmoil and lashing treachery. You kind of feel small in their presence as they share and interpret the world they lay before you, and history never felt so real. With melodic hooks like grappling irons and unique, superb vocals this is one that won’t let you get away and not a single false step they have worked their bollocks off here and it shows so well.
Blood, fire, Eire. They have it in their hands
(9/10 Gizmo)
08/09/2013 at 8:52 am
A band that hadn’t appeared on my radar until their excellent set at BOA. Think that’s another purchase required.