Back down in the dregs, My Dying Bride's eight studio album is not only a worthy follow-up to 2001's The Dreadful Hours, but it seems to touch the same emotional and musical pit that Like Gods of the Sun did back in 1997. Vocalist Aaron Stainthorpe is in amazing from, alternating his attack between despair-drenched moaning drones and roaring pathos. The interplay between guitarists Hamish Glencross and Andrew Craighan is more intimate and bone crunching than on any record in their doomy catalog. This is the sound of bleak, the growl of hopelessness, and the wail of pain and tears borne out in throbbing bottom-end blackness by drummer Shaun Taylor-Steels and bassist Ade Jackson. But if it weren't for the beautiful sound of wasted mourning via Sarah Stanton's organ, they could never enter these textural depths.