My Dying Bride
The Barghest O' Whitby

You have twenty years of career behind you, your latest albums are rather lousy, and you are finally about to write something new. What is the most convenient solution? Simple: if you prefer to avoid retirement and don't want to keep churning out mediocre works, take a leap back a few decades and try in every way to faithfully recreate the glory of yesteryears. The best cure for uncertainties about the future is to reckon with one's past; or at least it would seem so for My Dying Bride, quickly back with this brand-new EP after the colossal bore of "Evinta".

However, this is not an EP like many others: in it, you won't find questionable new tracks (commonly known as "leftovers"), covers, live excerpts, and various useless content, but an authentic reappropriation of the band's identity expressed in a single, powerful 27-minute suite. Quite a daring endeavor, considering we haven't seen such intricate and ambitious tracks from the Bride, not even with the legendary "Symphonaire Infernus Et Spera Empyrium" and "The Return Of The Beautiful", dating back to the early '90s; and it is precisely to that period that "The Barghest O' Whitby" is viscerally linked.

A sudden shift into reverse and an equally sudden recovery, then: forget (fortunately) the useless and gaudy redundancies of "Evinta"; abandon in the storeroom (hopefully forever) the hopeless whines of "For Lies I Sire"; smear the gothic of "A Line Of Deathless Kings" with pitch and dust, and then throw it into the time machine for a brief journey into the ancient and fascinating past of "As The Flower Withers" and "Turn Loose The Swans". Resurrecting such titles, besides causing a heart attack (and rightly so), may arouse some skepticism, and indeed we shouldn't expect a new masterpiece from this operation, which is nothing more than an interesting revival for all those who are fed up hearing the Bride whine like an ordinary emo.

But let's not ruin the listening experience with comparisons as useless as they are forced: the cursed atmospheres, the piercing melodies (and not simply "whiny"), the dirty and muddy guitars, the dragging and solemn rhythms, the finally inspired violin parts, and the much-desired recovery of the most oppressive death/doom from their beginnings (in the unsettling introduction and especially in the bone-crushing finale) make this EP a precious interlude that will satisfy the nostalgic fans of the band. An interlude, indeed, because that's what it is: now it will be up to our dashing undertakers from Yorkshire to decide whether to continue the discussion in a full-length album, thus formalizing a return to quality (or at least decency), or whether to diabolically persevere on the path of mediocrity...

[3.5/5]