This months Double Vision features reviews of two fantastic albums courtesy of Peaceville Records. On a par with Stallion Viper records Peaceville release some of the most exciting extreme rock music on the planet. Check out their web site its well worth a visit. So with out further ado here are this months headlining bands My Dying Bride and The Great Deceiver!

www.peaceville.com

With their latest release, Songs of Darkness, Words of Light, My Dying Bride conjure a foreboding soundscape of lost love, soul wrenching grief and untimely death. Slow plodding and sinister Songs of Darkness, Words of Light is the essence of Gothic romance. All the clichés are played out to the tune of the distorted guitar, the church organ, and the voice of a tortured soul. Yet somehow through all the familiar Goth stereotypes the listener is captivated by a pure sense honesty. The territory may be familiar but the guide who leads us is through this domain presents us with a unique perspective. The essence of doom metal may be posthumous depression yet the psychiatrist would conclude that My Dying Bride are not faking symptoms and that a course of Prozac is genuinely needed.

Sinister, haunting and beautiful, like ritual suicide, Songs of Darkness, Words of Light is essential listening for the morbidly obsessed.

Best Track: The deceptively accessible ‘My Wine in Silence’.

The Great Deceiver are five very angry men from Sweden. They express their anger by combining all the elements of extreme music in to one combustible Molotov cocktail of a sound. Death metal, hardcore, thrash, industrial, punk, even a hint of techno all merge into one almighty aggressive wall of sound. But while most extreme bands fail to raise a good tune from their arsenal of discordant noise The Great Deceiver achieve the exact opposite. Terra Incognita may be harsh, abrasive, and unrelenting but it still posse’s melody, pace, and rhythm. The Great Deceiver know how to write a good tune. Terra Incognito is an album void of filler tracks or half hashed efforts.

This is metal how it should be. Heavy and powerful with out a hint of commercialism or a whiff of pretension.

Best Track: The grove laden ‘Faust in Exile’.