MY DYING BRIDE: This Mortal Coil (2024)

By BRIAN GIFFIN

AT the beginning of the nineties, the aggressive and dissonant sounds of death metal were beginning to emerge as a genre that would dominate into the next decade. Into this changing scene stepped My Dying Bride, a band whose music was the very antithesis of the speed and brutality that was becoming popular in the underground. With Yorkshire brethren Paradise Lost and Liverpudlians Anathema, My Dying Bride would pioneer the death-doom movement and heavily influence Gothic metal.

But in the beginning, their music was a complete curiosity.

“No one seemed to understand what we were trying to achieve at the time,” admits guitarist and composer Andrew Craighan, “and in fairness, the bands we were listening to when we were doing the early albums – Deicide, Morbid Angel and Carcass … Bolt Thrower whom I keep mentioning because I love them – we were death metal fans, and thrash metal fans. We did have songs like that but we tended to gravitate towards the slower songs. I don’t know why, I think we preferred it, we found ourselves better at that.”

With a grin he says they were hardly going to be able to compete with Morbid Angel, but the band’s listening tastes went far beyond death metal. Those influences crept into their music too.

“We ended up being odd not be design, but just by the nature of who we were and who we were listening to. And we were also listening to Dead Can Dance and Swans and various other bands. [Original member] Calvin [Robertshaw] at the time was a big fan of Klaus Schultze, and if you bring these ethereal aspects into My Dying Bride and try to recreate them, you get what My Dying Bride was.”

Schultze was a German pioneer in electronic music who was with Tangerine Dream in the seventies and released a staggering amount of work. Craighan and the rest of My Dying Bride were also enamoured of the Bohemian spirit of Celtic Frost.

“When Into the Pandemonium came out by Celtic Frost, they were using violins and stuff and they didn’t give a fuck what they did. They just did anything they felt like, and we thought, ‘we can do that if they’re doing it’. We’re all massive fans. We bought the gatefold album with the fantastic Bosch artwork everywhere. It was wonderful, and we thought we’ll do some of that!”

Thirty-four years and 13 albums later, My Dying Bride are regarded as one of the pinnacle acts of the death-doom genre and are one of Britain’s most celebrated metal acts. The breadth of their influence has been vast, and Craighan shows a great deal of pride in that.

“I would have thought it was disingenuous of anybody – not just MDB, but anybody,” he begins, “to be given a compliment like that, other bands saying ‘You were a big influence on us’, and not being somewhat proud. It’s impossible to not feel happy about that, knowing that you had such an effect on people that they decided to do a band like yours or in your style. We can see the influence on other bands in their names. They’re using our song titles. One of the biggest bands who openly said MDB was a big influence is Nightwish. Their keyboardist doesn’t even try to hide the My Dying Bride influence. Which is great! They’re enormous. It does fill you with joy. There’s no way that it can’t.”

Joy has never been a key emotion in My Dying Bride’s music. It’s a feeling generally replaced by longing, sorrow, heartbreak and despair. Previous album The Ghost of Orion certainly explored dark territory as vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe grappled with the aftermath of his daughter’s cancer struggle, and the timing of its release set it against the gloom of the COVID pandemic. The band’s new release, A Mortal Binding, is a very different album in tone and style while remaining within the My Dying Bride wheelhouse.

“You immediately try not to do the last album,” Craighan says, “and then that doesn’t necessarily paint you into a corner but it does close the doors a little bit because what are we going to do? You don’t want to be different, so it’s still us.”

So the band chose to lean more into death metal.

“We decided – the musical side of the band when we were in rehearsal – that we were going to bring back riffs. Big riffs. We’re going to bring back some teeth. This is why there’s pinched harmonics, this is why there’s feedback, and a rhythmic drive underneath the riffs. We’re going to make a heavy metal album that will very much be My Dying Bride, but heavy metal first, and My Dying Bride veneer over the top.”

Craighan gives a fascinating insight into how My Dying Bride write and develop their songs, a system as idiosyncratic as their early musical beginnings. Starting with the riffs, he explains, the band – he and guitarist Neil Blanchett, bass player Lena Abé, drummer Dan Mullins and keyboards player Shaun McGowan – head into the rehearsal room with a list of potential titles and start to craft their songs without any input from Stainthorpe, who rarely gets together with the band until recording time.

“We deliberately wrote riffs and song structures that would complement or instigate death metal vocals,” the guitarist continues, “because we’re big fans of that as well. We like that more than the clean stuff, so we were deliberately trying to guide the songs so there was more death metal than cleans, and I think we succeeded because there’s a nice balance there, too.”

The titles he comes up with sometimes change, in the end, but they exist as a guide to the feel of a track.

“We create these fictitious storylines so we can build the song,” he explains, “and then when it gets to the actual recording studio, that’s when the vocals go on. There’s not really any changes to the arrangements, because that’s just how we operate now.”

Two of Craighan’s title ideas survived the writing process, one because he essentially had an idea what the song should be about, and one because the band just clicked with it.

“I had an idea of what ‘The Second of Three Bells’ should be about. We have the titles on the wall and we fill the song in, so we create the story ourselves. Then when the vocals come in, sometimes it matches and sometimes it doesn’t. The other one was ‘The Apocalyptist’. Everybody knew what sort of song that was going to be. They look at that title and they go, ‘well, I know where it’s going! You don’t even have to explain it!’ You write some riffs and massage them into place, and suddenly you’ve got an 11-minute song.”

It turned in some surprising results, even for Craighan. Other bands at their rehearsal space started ribbing them for the creative choices they were hearing coming from the room.

“I think I was surprised when I listened back to, particularly the beginning of ‘Her Dominion’, it’s really got some edginess to it. Which I felt was pretty cool, and oddly enough, there’s a few bands that rehearse next to us and when we were practising that, in the gaps they would all shout ‘Angus!’ I was like, ‘Fucking…really?’ It’s pretty cool, but it’s not supposed to sound like AC/DC!”

A Mortal Binding sounds nothing like AC/DC, of course. It’s still very much the My Dying Bride that fans and imitators have come to adore, and while they might be committed to trying different things now and then, it’s not likely they’ll be stepping out of the doom arena.

“We’re not trying to move away from what we more or less originally set out to be,” Craighan promises. “We haven’t moved as far away as Opeth have from death beginnings and certainly not as far away as Anathema has. I’m not sure they’re a metal band at all, anymore. More credit to them. It takes balls to try and do something different. I’m not sure we’ve got the balls to try that! But to be fair, I like this! It’s the way we do it.”

Like every new album they release, A Mortal Binding is likely to be compared with early works especially Turn Loose the Swans, which is still held up as the epitome of the doom-death genre. As revered as it is now, it wasn’t always that way.

“When Turn Loose the Swans came out,” Craighan remembers, “it wasn’t [seen] the album it is now. That’s because everybody’s got 20/20 hindsight. They can now see the overall scene that PL and Anathema and My Dying Bride, in the middle, and their initial albums and the genesis of this scene and it became whatever it became – the death/doom thing. There were very shocking reviews from the English magazines about Turn Loose the Swans, and we were heartbroken. It’s not that bad! And now it’s the best thing since sliced bread. There’s no way we could write that again. It’s not possible.”