What Graceless Dawn

Worm Ouroboros' sound may not be something all metalheads would get into, with its delicate songs and pensive female vocals, but it grew on me with some listening. A little bit like Amber Asylum without the cellos (vocalist/bassist Lorraine Rath was involved with the latter band for a while, actually), What Graceless Dawn is dark and minimalistic, a walk through a hallway of a haunted Victorian mansion. Rath's vocals combine with guitarist Jessica Way's in a windy, ethereal harmony, with the instrumental portions well-produced but very minimalistic. Ringing guitar passages echo, interspersed with slow, careful drumming from former Agalloch drummer Aesop Dekker. The songs are billed as a sort of ambient doom, and certainly there's a doomy feel in there, and there's some drone influence too in the repetitive riffs of songs like Ribbon of Shadow. When the distortion finally kicks in, usually quite a ways into the song, the guitar still echoes and rings the way it did while it was playing cleanly. I wouldn't call the long instrumental passages of the tracks a weak point, but they do have to be listened to in the right frame of mind. At least half of (Was It) The Cruelest Thing, for example, is meandering bass, overlaid by chorus-pedaled riffs, and Night, an even softer and more ethereal clean venture by the band, is so whispered and delicate most of the time that it needs to get turned up to properly listen to it. But the trio clearly know what they are about, and weave a convincing sound together without repeating themselves. Listeners to Eight Bells or Amber Asylum should probably check this one out.