My Dying Bride: Turn Loose The Swans (clear vinyl) [PEACEVILLE]

Why you'll love it

This limited clear vinyl pressing gives the album a fittingly ghostly look. Turn Loose the Swans helped shape the death-doom sound and earned an IMPALA gold award for 75,000 sales across Europe.

This edition

• Clear vinyl
• Limited edition

About the album

Some bands get heavier on their second album. My Dying Bride got slower, longer and a great deal more romantic. Turn Loose the Swans swapped much of the death metal of their debut for something stranger: Martin Powell's violin woven right through the songs, and Aaron Stainthorpe moving between deep growls, spoken word and a plaintive, lovelorn croon.

The album opens and closes without a single guitar, bass or drum. "Sear Me MCMXCIII" is just Stainthorpe's voice with Powell's keyboards and violin, and "Black God" sets the last eight lines of a poem by the 18th-century Scottish poet William Hamilton, with Zena adding female vocals. In between come the slow-motion riffs of "Your River," "The Songless Bird" and the twelve-minute "The Crown of Sympathy," with the band co-producing alongside Robert Magoolagan. Stainthorpe and guitarist Andrew Craighan designed the artwork themselves.

It laid the ground for the gothic metal that followed, on their own records and plenty of others. Rolling Stone called it "Bram Stoker's Dracula for the ears" in 1994 and compared the band to Laura Ashley's evil twin, which may be the most English thing ever said about a doom record.

Also at Kops: more My Dying Bride on vinyl · browse Metal

Tracklist

Listen

On Peaceville, a reissue of the 1993 album.