Bell Witch
Mirror Reaper
Release Date: Oct 20, 2017
Genre(s): Pop/Rock, Doom Metal
Record label: Profound Lore
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Album Review: Mirror Reaper by Bell Witch
Great, Based on 4 Critics
Based on rating 8.0/10
Seattle doom metal duo Bell Witch's first two albums engaged fearlessly with themes of death and transience. Their 2015 release Four Phantoms even got into the grisly details, envisioning ghosts dying for all eternity by each of the four elements: buried alive in earth, burnt at the stake, drowning in a river, and falling into winds so harsh they tear the skin off the dead. That album's fantastical details and grandiose scope painted death as something inevitable, but easier to imagine as a fable than as reality.
Based on rating 4/5
Pendulum, Silent gavel (of time)” – Adrien Guerra, “Words of the Dead,” Mirror Reaper B ell Witch’s 2012 debut, Longing, was a vigorously slow-burning album that counterposed airy doom tones and heavy-landing melodies against a distant, shadowy landscape of solemn drumming. Longing gestured toward the ground and our inevitable reunion with it, but it also pointed ahead, its rumbling guitars drafting a contract that would be signed by 2015’s Four Phantoms. That album not only saw the music of Dylan Desmond (bass) and Adrien Guerra (drums) come into a stunningly coherent maturity, but it also ushered in a colossal sense of funereal drama that pushed Bell Witch to the head of the contemporary doom metal pack.
Based on rating 8/10
Bell Witch's third LP is over 80 minutes long and consists of one sprawling opus of a track. The band has always been adept at crafting delicate but powerful doom metal, spacing out heavier, riff-oriented moments with ethereal instrumental passages, but that accessible structure reaches a creative apex in the labyrinthine twists and turns of Mirror Reaper. The ominous atmosphere that saturates the record contains pockets of beauty and reflection that are indicative of its dualistic conceptual themes. Honorary third band member Erik ….
Based on rating 2.9/5
Listening to Bell Witch is typically a surprisingly effortless endeavor. As unwieldy as the 20-minute aural behemoths found on Four Phantoms are, they go down particularly smooth. Bell Witch are masters of making the un-listenable very listenable; crafting songs that test listeners patience while singing of bleakness and death to the point where it actually seeps into one's psyche.
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