DREAM UNENDING, the eclectic duo uniting Derrick Vella of Tomb Mold and Justin DeTore of Innumerable Forms, Sumerlands, and Magic Circle, will deliver their expansive third album, Certain Uncertainties, via 20 Buck Spin this Friday.
With their first two albums, DREAM UNENDING transformed the familiar architecture of death doom into a place of their own making. A language where cavernous heaviness could coexist with progressive rock, ambient music, jazz-informed improvisation and a disarming emotional candor. On their new album Certain Uncertainties, that expression remains intact, but its gaze has shifted. Where previous records often seemed to reach upward and outward, this one comes back down to earth: leaner in construction, rougher around the edges and possessed of a distinctly nocturnal atmosphere. Call it adult contemporary doom, perhaps; music of considerable weight that has nevertheless learned how much can be said by leaving certain things unsaid.
Recorded with fewer layers and a deliberately more immediate instrumental approach, Certain Uncertainties gives the individual performances room to breathe. Derrick Vella’s guitars move through blues, jazz and progressive vocabulary with unusual freedom, at times carrying the open-ended character of American roots music into territory rarely encountered within doom. Justin DeTore’s drums are present throughout, lending the album a more physical momentum and helping its compositions arrive at their destinations with greater economy. Yet concision has not diminished DREAM UNENDING‘s taste for release: the opening and closing pieces in particular build toward enormous pressure points, while the spaces between allow Vella’s playing to wander, react, and occasionally remain imperfect. Each song operates as its own vignette; part desert reverie, part after-hours noir; with traces of Western landscape, dim rooms and empty roads running throughout the album.
That earthbound quality suits an album concerned, at its core, with instability and reconstruction. Written during a period in which Vella was rebuilding his own sense of confidence in risk-taking, Certain Uncertainties carries doubt within it without surrendering to despair. The bruised balladry of “I Carry Your Burden,” the improvisational openness of the title track, and the album’s uglier eruptions of death doom all belong to the same emotional terrain: beauty and discomfort allowed to occupy the same frame. If DREAM UNENDING‘s earlier work imagined another world beyond the limits of heavy music, Certain Uncertainties finds something equally strange in the one beneath our feet. A record of dry air, long shadows, unresolved questions and the stubborn impulse to keep moving through them. Fans of Anathema, Blue Nile, Live, Evoken, Tiamat, Opeth, Trouble, Alice In Chains, and Kings X must hear DREAM UNENDING.
With Justin DeTore on drums and vocals, and Derrick Vella handling guitars and bass, Certain Uncertainties features several special guests, with trumpet from Leila Abdul-Rauf (Vastum) and additional percussion by Benny Grotto on the title track, keys on “Rubato” by Dave Vella, and vocals on “I Carry Your Burden” by Brendan Radigan (Magic Circle, Pagan Altar).
The drums were recorded by Arthur Rizk at Solomon’s Gate except “Certain Uncertainties,” recorded by Benny Grotto at Mad Oak Studios, and the guitars and bass were recorded by Sean Pearson at Boxcar Sound. The album was mixed and mastered by Arthur Rizk with additional editing by Tom Waltz, and the album is completed with cover art by Benjamin Vierling (Dream Unending, Joanna Newsom, Pallbearer) and layout by Chimere Noire.
Derrick Vella calls the album, “An adventurous forty-one-minute ride where Justin and I work through sounds and moods that further expand the aural mosaic that makes up DREAM UNENDING. It’s doom, it’s noir, it’s western, it’s ECM, it’s prog. A new direction. The dream of a new frontier.”
Hear DREAM UNENDING’s entire Certain Uncertainties now playing on the 20 Buck Spin YouTube channel at THIS LOCATION.
Certain Uncertainties will be issued on LP, CD, MC, and digitally this Friday, October 30th. Preorders for all formats are available at 20 Buck Spin’s webshop HERE and Bandcamp HERE.
“Certain Uncertainties, the third DREAM UNENDING album, is a left turn. Mellow, jazzy, bluesy, rarely heavy, it’s remarkably chill in much the same way as Tiamat’s Wildhoney and Opeth’s Damnation, and DREAM UNENDING are all the better for it.” – Decibel Magazine
“…DREAM UNENDING combine abrasive, echo-drenched gargle-thunder with spacious ornamental delicacy in ways that somehow serve both impulses.” – Stereogum
“…a melancholy lead guitar floats above the deathly gurgle, giving a melodic sweetness to what might otherwise be death-doomly mire.” – The Obelisk
“DREAM UNENDING never did their brand of death doom by painting inside the lines or using predictable colors; they always hinted so much more was possible from these two. And now that promise pays off with this expansive record that also insists that their limits creatively do not exist.” – Meat Mead Metal
“I’m not sure I was left with an inkling where they’ll flow with it next, at all, but there was no question I’d been listening to DREAM UNENDING as there is very little I could compare the experience with.” – Mystification Zine
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The post DREAM UNENDING: Third LP By Dream Doom Duo, Certain Uncertainties, Now Streaming Ahead Of Its Release This Friday October 30th On 20 Buck Spin first appeared on Earsplit Compound.