Dark Chapel – Spirit in the Glass
Release Date: 24th February 2025
Label: MNRK Heavy
Bandcamp
Genre: Hard Rock, Grunge, Metal.
FFO: Black Label Society, Alice in Chains, Stone Temple Pilots.
Review By: Paul Franklin
Dark Chapel is the brainchild of Black Label Society axeman Dario Lorena. After releasing two solo instrumental albums, he has recruited some like-minded individuals into his ministry and created a debut album that blends the muscle-bound heavyweight rock of his previous employer with some full on retro 90s grunge aesthetics.
Tossing huge riffs aside left, right and centre, Afterglow opens the album like a stampede.
Hollow Smile doesn’t slacken the pace, indeed adding some 80s metal into the thundering cacophony, whilst turning up the grunge vibe to the vocals.
However, around track three, We Are Remade, the mixture starts to split, and you begin to notice an increasing dissonance between the music and the vocals. Both elements are great in their own right, but you suspect that they perhaps aren’t as comfortable with each other as they first appeared to be. The testosterone fuelled riffs and the squealing solos at odds with the more introspective and angsty vocal tone.
If you need a suitable movie based analogy, just imagine that, instead of Cameron Crowe, 90s Seattle based rom-com Singles had been given to Michael (Bigger Bang) Bay to direct!
Surprisingly then, after five tracks, the band pull back on the throttle, ditch the bombast and deliver two moodily atmospheric numbers, Dead Weight a sombre piano ballad and Dark Waters, which with its warm acoustic guitar and Layne Staley-like vocals could easily have been a missing track from Jar of Flies.
The effect that this ‘acoustic intermission’ has on the rest of the album is intriguing (and welcome). It’s as if the band had a half-time team talk and realised that after an explosive start things were getting a bit frantic, and they had started to lose their direction. So, they stopped for a breather, reassessed their approach and began the second half with far more fluidity and cohesion. All That Remains, Gravestoned Humanity, and Bullet In Our Chamber are all great. By slowing the mixer down and introducing some bluesy notes, they get the blend spot on and end on a high.
(3.5 / 5)
