ALBUM REVIEW: A THOUSAND LITTLE DEATHS BY BLACKBRIAR

Reviewed by Cecilia Pattison-Levi

This record ‘A Thousand Little Deaths’ by Dutch symphonic metal band Blackbriar is a ten-song cycle of a relationship breakdown and the journey of that soul through heartbreak, deception, love, hate, and the small cuts, bruises and atrophy in life that kill us slowly. The songs are wrapped around by note perfect instrumentation, lyrics embedded in Greek myth, complex imagery, spectral forces and gothic intrigue and a truly ethereal voice that floats over the controlled chaos.

This album is one of the best I have heard all year as the lyric writing by Zora Cock and the band is just superb. The lyrical and instrumentation has big drums, low tuned guitars, basslines, light piano, strings provide a framework to highlight the striking and beautiful voice floating over the dark and deliberate heaviness of the band’s sonic soundscape. The album opens with lovely strings on ‘Bluebeard’s Chamber’ a tale about love come undone due to lack of trust. A new lover is forbidden from entering the chamber, but she opens does it and the relationship is undermined and ruined. It is the focal point of the album. The following song, written and workshopped by the whole band, is ‘The Hermit And The Lover’ and it starts with a chugging guitar as ethereal vocals speak about a secret love. The cold as ice ‘The Fossilised Widow’ tells the story of a girl trapped in time as she desperately tries to hold on to someone she can never let go of and the line: “Where are you my murderer” reveals her fate. This is strong writing.

The next three songs in the cycle are the fabulous ‘The Lonely Crusade’ where the central figure in the narrative is “moping in solitude” as her love interest is “slowly killing me – leaving me dead”, but “I am not death yet”. The Victorian and slightly macabre ‘Floriography’ concerns the art and act of cryptological communication through flower arrangements and colours which is fascinating as a language of love. Then, ‘The Catastrophe That Is Us’ is a great song about the driving need people have for each other and is the central tenant of the album’s core thematic world.

The heavy instrumentation ushers in ‘A Last Sigh Of Bliss’ with big guitars with strings dropped low down the scale, a driving bassline riff, drums and a haunting piano lightly tinkling behind the heavenly voice that sounds like it is “drowning in honey”. Then, the reimagined sirens tale ‘Green Light Across The Bay’ retold from thinking about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ as a tale of wanting something you can never reach. ‘I Buried Us’ brings the lovers to the end of being interned in the earth and looking for a path to the afterlife and immortality as symbolised in the Taxus Yew tree.

The album closes with the mythological rich ‘Harpy’ which in Ancient Greek means ‘snatcher’ and can also mean a storm that sweeps people’s souls and emotions away. Harpies are known as human vultures. But it is the ‘Harpy’ who takes the soul of our protagonist into her nest and lays them to rest. The instruments whip up a storm that has a heavenly voice sings through the controlled chaos.

‘A Thousand Little Deaths’ is a great album: a cohesive whole with perfect music, lyrics and voice. It is an impressive feat that shows the real growth and maturity in song and music writing that is going on with Blackbriar as a band. So good!