Dream Unending – Song of Salvation
Release Date: 11th November 2022
Label: 20 Buck Spin
Bandcamp
Genre: Doom
FFO: Anathema, Evoken, Tiamat, Opeth, Trouble, Blue Nile, Live, Alice In Chains, King’s X.
Review By: Eric Wilt
Dream Unending put out one of the better doom albums of 2021, and they are already back with their sophomore release. With their new album, Song of Salvation, Dream Unending has created a new style of metal, a genre I will respectfully call “dream-doom.” I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that the word “dream” is part of the band’s name, nor that Song of Salvation plays out like one long dream that ends when a male narrator says, “I awoke and remembered everything.” Everything from the clean guitar parts dripping with reverb to the contemplative trumpet on Secret Grief to the whispering voices in Murmur of Voices to the aforementioned narration at the end of Ecstatic Reign where the speaker says he awoke creates the feeling of being in a dreamscape where the music is painting the dream.
The album begins with Song of Salvation, a fourteen-minute epic that opens with the clean, reverb-laced guitars that can be seen as the dreamer going to sleep. The heavy guitars and growled vocals enter relatively quickly and is very reminiscent of the atmospheric doom of Tide Turns Eternal. As with all of their music, Dream Unending is in no hurry on Song of Salvation, and they let it float through clean and heavy parts that culminates in a very tasteful guitar solo that only uses the number of notes necessary to accent the clean guitars that are playing beneath it.
Secret Grief comes next and adds what I believe is an octave pedal to the already reverb-drenched guitars. A trumpet played by Leila Abdul-Rauf leads into clean singing that is itself drenched in reverb. All of this works to continue building the dream-like feeling that began with Song of Salvation. Secret Grief is a much shorter song than its predecessor, but it too ebbs and flows through clean and distorted parts.
The next two songs, Murmur of Voices and Unrequited are instrumentals. Murmur of Voices features a number of voices whispering in a way that adds to the feeling of being in a dream. Neither song, Murmur of Voices nor Unrequited use distorted guitars, so even though the songs are enjoyable, they leave the listener wishing there was some more death-doom to be had.
Fortunately, the album closer returns to the world of heavy dream-doom. Clocking in at around sixteen-minutes, Ecstatic Reign plods through hills and valleys of light and dark, beauty and heaviness, and even uses an organ for a section of funeral doom. A female voice sings on this track right before the song opens up with some traditional metal flavor that leads to a dual guitar solo that adds dissonance to the song. As was stated earlier, the dream and the album come to a close at the end of Ecstatic Reign when the male speaker says, “I awoke and remembered everything.”
Overall, Song of Salvation is an enjoyable continuation of the style of music that Dream Unending began playing on Tide Turns Eternal. This album does spend a bit too much time on clean guitar instrumental sections without either heavy guitars or growled vocals for my taste, but it’s clear that Derick Vella and Justin De Torre are writing the rules, and even with my minor complaint, I still think that Song of Salvation is a musical dream-journey worth taking over and over.
(4 / 5)
