One of the most important keys to good doom – and minimal music of all types – is efficiency. It isn’t efficient with time, obviously, as doom is the metal most known for its drawn-out dirges of darkness, but to excel, it must be efficient when making a big point. A song may repeat the same small set of riffs for many minutes, but success comes by only cashing in on the momentum and tension at key moments. Reverend Bizarre was masterful at this, as has always been My Dying Bride. Repeating a climax cheapens its value, and the value of the song as a whole, particularly when the elements are stripped to their very barren cores.
This bit of compositional importance is at the center of Majestic Downfall’s fourth full length, …When Dead, for both better and worse. The (mostly) solo project of Jacobo Córdova, Majestic Downfall pulls from a fairly wide spectrum of doom/death greats, being sure to completely emphasize the opposite poles of the style as well as the blended middle. At its best, it is a deeply immersive album, and at its worst, it is merely inefficiently enjoyable. No major crime, but a big case of what could have been.
“Escape My Thought” and “Doors” are the big offenders, but neither really needed to be. The former’s mix of heavy doom/death with some ferocious blasting and passages of Gothic-era Paradise Lost worship is at times glorious, while the latter’s Swallow the Sun-gone-funeral depths are often irresistible, particularly when paired with Córdova’s top notch growls. But both sport unnecessarily bloated run times (15-plus and 12-plus minutes, respectively) that are filled up largely by the repetition not of mood, but of ideas, blunting their effects and making the latter minutes of both tracks a bit of a chore.
Thankfully, the other two main tracks fare better. “The Brick, the Concrete” is drenched in MDB riffage (but not their clean vocals), getting closer to that ideal arc with a nice melodic resolution. But the album’s real gem is closer “The Rain Of The Dead,” which stretches out previous tracks’ hints of melancholy for its entirety. Here, softer sections – complete with cool, half-sung “tortured” vocals – share time with hefty atmospheric death, only reaching to blast beats occasionally as a cool backdrop for sorrowful guitar melodies. The emotion peaks with a very Gregor Mackintosh-inspired solo, lifting up the punctuated aggression that finishes off the track.
One might argue that the extended track times of …When Dead are merely there to expand the mood and perpetuate the doomy suffering. On an album with fewer outbursts of blast-beat-ridden violence, this argument might hold up, but Majestic Downfall clearly wants to keep a listener’s attention throughout. In the end, this is a solo project that often sounds as such. Córdova is clearly adept at the doom/death arts, and at times his vision leads to striking music, but parts of the album needed some shrewd editing, the kind that so often comes from additional voices during the songwriting process. And that’s unfortunate, because at its best, this shines.
