(Peaceville) www.peaceville.com
It's my firm opinion these guys are the best band in the whole genre of Goth metal. Yes, little lady sunshine, My Dying Bride. I can hear the wallows in cyberland of people reading this, some skully cap-wearing jerkoff saying, "Awww, you must be gay", and some new breed, 'I-wanna-be-a-redneck-when-I-grow-up' poser saying, "That's not rock and roll!" Well, shut up. Your opinions fall on deaf ears here. In the Queen's English, I don't fucking care. "For Darkest Eyes" collects MDB's promo clips and 2 live performances. And now, the question is - how does it measure up? Well, I'll tell you. The music vids, being a few years old, are great for the budget that was put into them. They try to make the vids interesting with lots of cool effects and ideas, (we don't have Tool's budget here, and '92 wass 10 years ago)... The songs go from their earliest work, Symhonaire Infernus Et Spera Empyrium and The Thrash of Naked Limbs with it's death metal vocals, violins, and slow, early English doom metal sound (you know the deal, early Paradise Lost and later-comers November's Doom for a reference); not 'angry hippy Neal from the Young Ones' doom like the first Cathedral, but much more atmosphere based and epic. As the clips roll on, the vocals go for a cleaner approach as the band progresses through the years, (like most of the bands of this genre, which is a good thing- I always liked when a singer of this type uses the best of both worlds to work with.) "The Cry of Mankind" video is a great song, but the pretentious Jesus Christ pose, and the leering into the camera that the singer does kinda ruins it, making the video almost comical, which is a pity, because the song is beautiful and does not do it justice.
The best one is the last vid "For You" from the album "Like God's of the Sun", which has footage of a guy with no shirt on, writhing on a floor after overdosing on pills in a small room filling up with water, with his woman stalking around him, stomping in the water and such. It's kinda cool, because it leaves the image that the woman might be the pills he just overdosed on.
The CD also comes with 2 live concerts from Europe, and is filled with over 200 minutes of stuff. That's a tall order. Luckily, being the hopeless romantic I am, My Dying Bride are a band that has pulled me through many brokenhearted nights. - Greg Dellaria