Artist: The Man-Eating Tree
Title: Vine
Type: Album
Label: Century Media

Finally, I’ve found a label for this type of music. For years, the likes of Anathema, Swallow The Sun and Extol have been under the doom metal label, which seems a bit too crowded for them. But thanks to The Man-Eating Tree’s blurb writers, I now have a new title: atmospheric metal. In case you’re wondering, it’s a genre that combines the unhurried gait of doom metal with the equally ponderous dead-weight footfalls of some of the more fatalistic grunge. And in this case, somebody whose vocal idol is a weird amalgamation of Eddie Vedder and Geddy Lee, but Toumas Tuominen has the pipes to pull it off.

There’s also a faint whiff of goth around the place, since they generously lace some of the songs with acoustic guitars, what sounds suspiciously like a harpsichord, and the sense of incredible grandiosity in the likes of ‘Of Birth And Passing’ and ‘Nights Of White Satan’. That’s a compliment, by the way. Each track makes unhurried use of the running time. ‘Lathing A New Man’ is a good as opening track as you’re likely to hear anywhere, showcasing exactly what this band are about. A delicately picked passage with a double-time bass line heart beat underneath turns into what would happen if Alice In Chains and Soundgarden spent more time listening to prog rock. Much like the intro to ‘The White Plateau’, with a chorus tha, musically speaking at least, brings Rammstein to mind, before morphing into something that could easily have been on a latter-day Tool record.

And thus, you have the major meat of this album: a stately procession, that doesn’t worry so much about creative dynamic shifts, as it does providing a dignified take on the doom genre, with Tuominen’s vocals in particular providing a combination of bravado and vulnerability that might render ‘Nights In White Satan’s the oft-repeating line “...because I love you” rather trite. Each song is a microcosm of grand ideas, ‘Tide Shift’ in particular. They could easily plunge to the depths for the grand finale, but this remains curiously restrained. But then again, the enjoyment is coming not from the thrills that you can immediately pick out, like picking the pepperoni off your mate’s pizza, but from relaxing, lying back, and drinking in the atmosphere as ‘Instead Of Sand And Stone’ and ‘Amended’ wash over you in waves.

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