“Doom done right”. That should be the tagline attached to Morne’s To The Night Unknown. Heavy and bristling with intensity, the latest (Their fourth, actually) album from the Boston behemoths is a slick metallic collection of tracks destined to seep into your consciousness and bite at your very soul! In a good way.
“To The Night Unknown” opens up with this grimy yet massive beast of a riff with Billy Knockenhauer’s marvelous, almost majestic double bass coming in like an earthquake then keeps droning on with riff after beautiful riff from Milosz Gassan and Paul Pajpal before this serene acoustic line fights through the dark to lead the song out.
“Not Our Flame” really goes for the jugular with this sweeping rager that culminates in an instrumental (I initially mistyped that as “instrumetal” but it’s kinda fitting, y’know?) riff-fest halfway through and just ups the guitar bravado and potency with this heavenly solo that just screams to the heavens. Then “The Blood Is Our Own” slams listeners over the head with accented screeches and Knockenhauer’s beyond brutal bashing until Gassan enters with that raspy scream that’s part Black Metal and part Doom but wholly unique to push the sonic buttons even further.
“Scorn” piledrives listeners with an unbridled start/stop attack from Knocenhauer then grows into a heaping groove monster propelled by bassist Morgan Coe before settling into Morne’s shreddy version of a Pop song, if you will, with its’ structure meaning that the song is probably the most straightforward track on here but still brims with an unparalleled force (Metalheads don’t worry, there’s no Maroon 5-sounding ditty in the middle of this beast).
“Shadowed Road” is a gloomy dirge that serves as the perfect precursor to closing opus “Surrendering Fear” which is a sweeping slowburn of riffs and rumbles and cymbalic (Get it? Like ‘symbolic’ but with cymbals…) crashes as Gassan’s voice echoes through the noise, lumbering to this grandiose “instrumetal” conclusion.
To The Night Unknown is out on September 7th through Armageddon Label. Pre-orders are up now and available by clicking here and here. Morne has some live shows coming up soon and that info, along with everything else you need to know about the band and their comings and goings, can be found by clicking here.