I’ve already told you to listen to Marrowfields on the latest Doomsday entry. I hinted we might have something more from the band in store soon and here is that thing; an exclusive track premiere for “Crow and Raven”, the second track off of their upcoming album, Metamorphoses. In case you missed the memo, Marrowfields play a kind of melodic, emotional, and contemplative doom, drawing comparisons to bands like Pallbearer, Garganjua and AHAB. On their upcoming release, they channel their grandiose, charged ideas towards the fantastical and moral tales of Ovid’s classics, painting a lush image of the human condition and our emotional states. Head on below for the single!
You can really hear the AHAB comparison on the excellently morose opening note of this track. I love how those first, sparse few notes really set the stage for the emotional “weight” of the rest of the track, like a deep breaths before the deluge begins in earnest. When it does, it is the vocals of all things that lead the charge; like on the rest of the album, Marrowfields’ vocals are central to their music. Their timbre works very well with the rest of the instrumentation, channeling the track’s already nascent dark energies very well. But it’s their inflection, the way they hit the high notes and then collapse back into despair, that really gets across what the track is trying to get at and the emotional landscape that the band are aiming for.
Add in those crashing guitar notes and the cavernous drums to the mix and you have Marrowfields’ excellent range of expression all laid out. The album continues to hit those notes, always centering the narrative voice of the vocals within the music. That’s maybe the defining trait that sets them apart: instead of the vocals “floating” above the mix, like with Pallbearer for example, Marrowfields take a more old-school approach, wherein the vocals take front and center in the mix. If that sounds like the thing for you, and you liked what you heard here, make sure to head on over to the band’s Bandcamp page above and pre-order this beast of an album. It releases on April 24th.