Warning
The Strength To Dream

Once you enter their world, it's hard to leave.
Too emotional to remain indifferent.
Too intimate, romantic, suffocating.
Too Doom indeed. A doom that comes from England by a band still quite in the shadows.

The Warning have stood out in the record scene mainly thanks to the release  four years ago of the beautiful "Watching from a distance".
Few know that the band in question released their debut back in 1999.

"The Strength to Dream" is the ideal soundtrack of the tormented man. Among the sound gaps opened by a guitar never so slow and "dense" move lyrics of a disarming depth.

The great strength of the English band lies in their ability to create long and emotionally charged songs setting aside any kind of technicality, distancing everything that might seem experimental. Five tracks averaging 10 minutes where the guitar and a wrenching clean vocal hold the reins of an album, which in this sense is too similar to itself. The foundations are represented by a slow rhythmic section that touches the funeral doom multiple times, focusing everything on the sad and suffering voice of Pat Walker, capable of delivering truly unique emotions. Every monolithic composition of the platter is to be savored in every sonic nook, despite the static nature of the work, which is then the only real flaw of the record.

"The Return", "The Face That Never Dies" and the concluding title track reach peaks of emotionality at times disturbing. In this journey towards the discovery of ourselves, our staff will be the guitar of Pat Walker. The only glimpse of light will come at the minute 7:53 of the last track.
The start of a slow and delicate arpeggio is not, however, the much-longed-for hope, but rather an additional tunnel of desolation that accompanies us towards the end of a great work of pure doom metal, one without frills.

The Warning, despite their discographic immobility (having only released two works), are a band of absolute prominence in European doom. Bearers of an emotional charge that sometimes stuns and sometimes moves they have managed to create a style as personal as it is simple.

"The Strength to Dream" is a complicated listen: difficult to disentangle in the sound tar of the band.
Everything is made even more indigestible by the song durations.
However, this album, along with its successor, succeeds in the intent of generating a great amount of emotional suggestions from such a difficult genre to assimilate.

1. "The Return" (11:42)
2. "The Face That Never Dies" (7:11)
3. "Something Hurts" (7:48)
4. "How Can It Happen?" (10:09)    
5. "The Strength To Dream" (13:30)