A new Prophecy album is always welcomed with open arms. Both ‘Ashes’ and ‘Revelations’ were in my opinion classic British doom albums and after repeated listens, ‘Into The Light’ is another great opus from this miserable Yorkshire bunch. I say miserable as sitting down yesterday with this on in the background I was suddenly flung from the pages of the magazine I was reading and believe you me it takes a lot to distract me from a new issue of ‘Face Squatting Femmes’ (errr I mean Terrorizer) and into the lyrical content and to be honest it would not have taken much to get me to grab the razor blades. This is some utterly bleak shit, make no mistake.
Another thing that really strikes me about this lot are their fantastic album covers, just check them out lined up on the discography of their home page. I was going to say that they are each somewhat elemental and this was obviously the water album, ‘Revelations’ the air and ‘Ashes’ the fire but that is probably trying to interpret too much out of them.
Anyway to the music and this hour long serenade of sorrow starts with the title track slow and gruff, threatening to consume you. The light does dawn though with acoustic guitars and the first encounter of Matt Lawson’s clean vocals. The only way to describe them are heartfelt. It could be easy and slack to make comparisons to Anathema but they do share the same depth of emotion that very few can conjure up and they soar here with utter depth and yearning. The growls are also just as compelling and the flirtation between the two styles here works perfectly. A nice squeal from the guitars illustrates the harsh side of ‘Delusion’ but for every moment of darkness there is a contrast of light here and the cleanly sung chorus really counters it and ‘rises up’ in line with lyrics. The “Let me out” darker vocal roars are there, insistently showing that any hope is probably forlorn and sound like a caged lion angrily pacing back and forth.
It’s kind of hard not to drift off with the music at times it’s like being adrift in the very sea of the cover. There are moments that will calmly lull and others that will like a storm dash you back into their harsh grip. ‘Echoes’ is the album’s real mellow moment not perhaps as mellow as its Floydian namesake but an emotional clean sweep of a number with lush acoustic guitar moments and dreamy float off vocals. Rage is reinforced after this calm moment with ‘Belief Means Nothing’ a song whose sentiments ring very true and a title that would be very well placed on the side of one of London’s double deck buses. It is here that the lyrics really start getting to me and this certainly continues with the next downer anthem ‘All Is Lost.’ But I am not going to spoil them for you here. The jagged schizoid guitar work on that particular track is something worth mentioning and it really sticks out somewhat experimentally for the band.
There is perhaps ‘Hope’ at the end, certainly by song title and by then you will have been dragged through a sheer rollercoaster ride of emotions. This is a totally mature and even timeless release and in an age when the moronic masses are in the grip of throwaway consumable pop culture and reality television this makes it all the more endearing.
www.myspace.com/theprophecyeng
http://homepages.tesco.net/theprophecy
