EP Review: Drowning Hour - The Pain of Loss

 

Grief does not announce itself with fanfare, and neither does Drowning Hour. There is something quietly fitting about the fact that one of the more crushing death-doom records to surface this summer has crawled out of Shrewsbury, better known for its abbey and its flower show than for funereal metal. Yet here we are: The Pain of Loss, a four-track EP of atmospheric blackened death-doom, built entirely by hand, nothing but four people and their grief.

The crawling desolation of My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost, the frostbitten melancholy of Katatonia and Anathema, the exploratory gloom of early Opeth. Drowning Hour make no secret of that heritage, and The Pain of Loss is unashamedly built from those materials: tempos dragged down almost to a standstill, riffs that move like something heavy being hauled across a floor, and an atmosphere thick enough to lean on.

This is a properly DIY affair: Craig Gobold handles rhythm guitar, bass, and drums and mixed and mastered the thing himself, with Dan Ashley adding lead guitar over the top. The emotional weather, though, comes from the two voices. Kieran Scott – a familiar name to anyone who follows the UK underground through Death Collector and Ashen Crown supplies the low, cavernous roar, while Kelly Gobold answers him with clean, keening vocals that hang above the murk like light through a cracked window which works because the contrast feels genuinely lived rather than merely deployed.

The Pain of Loss is a concept EP,  with its four titles, Visitation, Longing, Inheritance, Farewell, read in sequence as the stages of grief.

Visitation opens the EP and does the work an overture should, easing you into the gloom rather than kicking the door down. It sets the tone, the slow build, the gathering weight, the sense of something approaching out of the dark and reads as the arrival of grief made audible, the visitation of the title carrying its full funeral weight, the wake and the viewing, the moment the death first has to be faced. It is scene-setting more than statement, but it draws the curtains and lowers the temperature exactly as it should.

Longing is one of the EP’s two centrepieces, and it is where Drowning Hour first show what they are about. This is yearning stretched to breaking point, a slow, punishing crawl built on riffs that seem reluctant to move at all, Scott’s growl scraping against the low end while the arrangement withholds any easy release. It is heavy in the emotional sense as much as the sonic one, making a virtue of patience, letting the ache accumulate rather than rushing to resolve it. If you want to know whether this band is for you, this is the track that will tell you.

 

Inheritance keeps the weight on and the mood black, the second of the record’s two heavyweights. Thematically it is the cruellest and most pointed stretch of the journey, not the shock of the death but what a father leaves behind him, the absence and the legacy handed down in equal measure to those still standing. Musically it deals in the same downcast, crushing heaviness, Scott’s death roar well matched to a theme of something inherited and unwanted. It is the least immediate moment here, the one most content simply to loom, and whether it grips you or wears you down will come down to your appetite for doom at its most unrelenting.

Farewell is where the EP turns, and it is the making of it. After three tracks of accumulated darkness, the finale lifts its head towards something closer to beauty. The clean vocals given room to breathe, the melody allowed to shine through the gloom, the whole thing settling into a mournful grace rather than another exercise in sheer weight. It is the sound of acceptance after anguish, the farewell that finally lets the father rest, and the contrast with everything before it is exactly what elevates the record. Play the EP straight through and this is the moment that lingers, the light at the end of a very dark corridor.

For a self-released record from a band most people may not yet have heard of, there is more than enough here to suggest Drowning Hour are worth keeping an eye on.

 

What gives Drowning Hour their edge is the emotional honesty , the sense that the pain of the title is real and personally lived rather than borrowed. This is an elegy, not an exercise, and it shows. Whether that grows into something larger than a four-track calling card is for the next release to prove. On this evidence, though, from a quiet corner of Shropshire, here is a band who understand that the heaviest thing you can put on a record is not a riff but a feeling.

 

Four movements through grief, from the first visitation to the final farewell.

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