Worship Metal Album Of The Week – With The Dead – Love From With The Dead

When the main axis of your band contains doom metal overlord (and Rise Above Records founder) Lee Dorrian and ex-Electric Wizard guitarist Tim Bagshaw, then it doesn’t take a genius to fathom out the genre of music With The Dead specialise in! Throw in the relatively recent addition of another ex-Cathedral member in bassist Leo Smee and ex-Bolt Thrower drummer Alex Thomas and you can rest assured that the finest quality doom metal is the order of the day.

For anyone not familiar with this soon to be iconic band, Love From With The Dead – With The Dead’s follow up to their self-titled 2015 debut – features ground-shaking, bowel-breaking, outrageously heavy, drawn-out songs about all those nasty things in life that make you want to say fuck it all and go on a homicidal rampage! It’s crushing, brutal and a warranted response to the shit-hole we currently call Planet Earth.

While Love From With The Dead is unmistakably the work of Lee Dorrian, you can rest assured that With The Dead is as far away from the so called ‘disco-doom’ of Cathedral as you can possibly get. In fact, to say Love From With The Dead moves at a snails pace would do it a disservice; bloody glaciers move quicker than some of the riffs displayed here!

Opener “Isolation” is home to walls of reverb drenched feedback, and it’s nearly a minute before the first of Tim Bagshaw’s numerous tectonic plate shifting riffs kick in, along with Dorrian howling like some demented animal. The rest of Love From With The Dead follows a similar pattern until “Watching The Ward Go By” somehow slows things down even further and proves to be a masterclass in building tension….taking a good six minutes before the band unleash their full armoury of sludgey goodness. Just when you think things can’t possibly be anymore oppressive, Love From With The Dead closes with the absolutely monstrous “CV1”, a track which crushes all who are foolish enough to get in its way.

If you prefer your music to give you a quick, immediate hit and make you feel good about your pitiful existence then you can jog on….With The Dead are not the band for you. However, if you like your music to be a weapon, one that crushes you under the weight of despair and reduces your vital organs to mush then this gloriously oppressive album is just what you need. 9/10

Love From With The Dead is available now via Rise Above Records!