PLEASE NOTE, THIS ITEM IS USED - ONLY PLAYED ONCE TO TEST VINYL
 
BLUE/WHITE/ORANGE/BLACK SPLATTER - ONLY 500 COPIES MADE
 
It’s been an exceptional time for metal that sounds like the dying cries of an alien planet being sucked into a black hole. Newer bands like Blood Incantation, Worm, and Spectral Voice have all taken the templates of old school death and doom metal and imbued them with a mystical, psychedelic aura, with songs whose thrashing riffs slowly spill into abstract ambience and shimmering post-rock guitars. Toronto’s Tomb Mold forged one of the heaviest totems yet to this stylistic rebirth with their dark, disorienting 2019 release Planetary Clairvoyance, thanks in no small part to the searing guitar work of Derrick Vella. Now, Vella has returned with Dream Unending—a “dream-doom” project with Innumerable Forms frontman Justin DeTore that pushes his guitar work even further outside the typical confines of metal.
 
One of the most immediately gripping qualities of Dream Unending’s debut, Tide Turns Eternal, is how much of it completely does away with death metal riffage altogether. Instead, the album is lined with lush, echoing 12-string guitars that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Durutti Column or Cocteau Twins record. A professed disciple of moody 1980s acts like the Cure and the Blue Nile, Vella captures those bands’ ability to weave lonesome, chorus-soaked textures into something yearning and warm, shrouding his wilted melodies in a dense haze of reverb and phaser pedals. As a result, Tide Turns Eternal is one of the most sonically diverse metal albums of the year, pulling a rich prism of tones and effects together to create a phantasmal gaze into the genre at its most heady. It really is a contender for metal album of 2021.