My Dying Bride
The Angel and the Dark River

THE REVIEW

Winter is approaching. Cold

Evening is approaching. Fear

Memory is approaching. Hypocrisy

A friend is approaching. Comfort

A sound is approaching. Analgesic

This is a very strange time we're going through... On one hand, the crisis that started in America and has now arrived, without even being announced, in our homes. They tell us everything is fine, but it's not true. In reality, this is what they want from us, to make us believe what we are not, what we would like to be, without letting us know that in the meantime we are sinking into the most desolate and dark abyss of our entire life, death.

The melancholic frame of all this is winter. The days grow shorter, the rain blocks the roads, kills people. Snow is a double-edged weapon, white and shiny on the outside, sad and depressed inside.
It is useless to deny that in these moments we are overwhelmed by solitude, which embraces us in its evil and dark spiral and makes us fall into a state of semi-sleep from which we will find no awakening.

In this way, we will forget all the memories of the past, all the bad moments we have gone through, mocked by others, isolated from friends, without anyone to protect you and give you their heart as protection, as a weapon to defeat evil, the pain.
But at the same time, we would no longer have the possibility to show others what we feel, to confide our feelings to someone, or simply on a damn sheet of paper! The rebellious part of ourselves would be definitively enclosed within a placenta of hypocrisy and cynicism, of dismay and disappointment.
Do you prefer this path?? Well I don’t, and I will try to defend myself in some way, one of these could be music, yes, the one that has accompanied us in the car, in our room, before an exam, before a meeting, before a dark and cold night.

In this context, I will analyze this album by My Dying Bride, but it's just one of the few CDs that truly move me still, but above all, open my eyes and make me realize that I must not stay still, but get up and damn fight!
7 songs... almost an hour of delirious poetry... is enough to fill my soul with good intentions and free it from the worries it holds. Passing through genuine gems, such as Cry of Mankind or Black Voyage or even Your Shameful Heaven, you reach the end of the disc with something new.
These gothic, spectral, lugubrious, dizzying atmospheres and that warm, seductive, terrifying voice, those electrifying, melancholic guitars, those theatrical, exhausting keyboards... It is in those moments, even though it is only a useless song of a useless CD, of a useless band from a useless place lost in the world, that you realize what death is and how it can be close to you, it can abduct you at any moment.
And it is then that you understand it's not what you want, you prefer to live, gripped by remorse, but alive, not in a silent, cold, and above all suffocating coffin.
The blood stops flowing in the veins, the heart stops beating, the brain stops thinking, the eyes stop moving incredulously in this new space that surrounds them, you are there, in the middle of a deserted place, in the most unconscious of your dreams, in the darkest of your nightmares, wondering what would have happened if what happened had not happened, what you could have done at that moment, who you could have saved for an instant.

With all the respect and humility in the world, I wish Malaika all the best and to find that world she never would have wished to encounter but life has set before her without warning her, without giving her one last kiss, without giving her one last look.

We Will Remember You Forever!