Bride in Waiting – Divine Martyr (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

Divine Martyr has always made a big sound. No bigger than that…bigger…keep going. Okay, it might be bigger than you can imagine; maybe you should just listen to the music, jog your memory and ‘Bride in Waiting,’ their latest single, is a great place to start the process.

If you need any further proof to fuel the argument that heavy metal (or whatever of the myriad sub-groups you prefer to label such music) is a branch of classical music, this track is the perfect ammunition.

Drop the needle on the track, and you are immediately consumed by the Sturm und Drang of Wagnarian drama, embroiled in bombastic sonics, wide-screen soundscaping and unbridled energy. This is indeed the sound that the aforementioned German might have come up with had electric guitars, modern drum kits and digital technology been available to him in mid-19th-century Dresden as he honed his sound between uprising and exile.

Kicking off with a tsunami of beats and orchestral arrays, incendiary guitars, and guttural vocals, the song certainly pins its colours to the musical mast when Kassandra Chandler‘s astonishing operatic tones kick in, the whole becoming a beautiful brutalist symphonic epic.

And in keeping with the song’s neo-classical nature, though such a word hardly begins to describe the epic scale and scope we are dealing with here, we look to composition and arrangement rather than merely songwriting. Musical elements arrive in swathes – regiments of guitar sound march across the creative space; bass lines are as melodic as much as they are depth-charge explosive; digital orchestras merge with metal mastery and, through it all, the light and shade, the heaven and hell of ethereal vocals and primal voices duet in a pandemonius pas de deux.

‘Bride in Waiting’ might be five minutes of extremes and juxtapositions and opposites that attract, but these collide and complement so well that five minutes is nothing like long enough. Fingers crossed for a full symphony at some point.

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