Artist: SPELL
Album: OPULENT DECAY (CD)

Release date: 2020
EAN/UPS: 0803343262292
Media type: CD

“Music, like dreams, exists in feeling rather than explanation. In sleep, the strangest things can elicit joy or terror — this is why dreams are so difficult to articulate. Creating music, for me, is similar; often, I’ll wake in the dead of night with a powerful feeling or melody in my mind, not connected to reality in any concrete way. I’ll then leap out of bed to try and capture it before it disappears!”

Thus reckons Cam Mesmer, bassist and vocalist of Spell. Hailing from Vancouver, British Columbia, yet divining their art from the realm of nocturnal visions and fantasies, this band have already proven themselves mighty chroniclers of the more supernatural quarters of the heavy music sphere.

Full Moon Sessions, their 2014 debut (reissued in 2018 on Bad Omen) and 2017’s For None And All are proof positive of an outfit — completed by drummer and co-vocalist Al Lester and guitarist Graham McVie - whose grasp of crepuscular atmosphere and diverting dynamics matched their infectious song-craft. However, these were apparently mere preludes to Opulent Decay, the band’s third and finest record to date on Bad Omen Records, and an aural vista where moonlit melody, strident heaviness and potent romanticism collide to startling effect.

Recorded by Felix Fung at Little Red Sounds studio in New Westminster, B.C., it’s an emotionally charged psychic travelogue wreathed in mysticism. Opulent Decay embraces harmonic guitar heraldry while also showcasing a band as adept at essaying a hymnal acapella piece like the beguiling ‘Ataraxia’ as they are the wistful and melancholic 'Dawn Wanderer', the pastoral-tinged and progressively slanted 'Primrose Path' or the catchy and barnstorming title-track.

CD:

1. Psychic Death     
2. Opulent Decay    
3. Sibyl Vane  
4. Primrose Path     
5. The Iron Wind    
6. Dawn Wanderer     
7. Deceiver     
8. Ataraxia   
9. Imprisoned By Shadows     
10. Saturn's Riddle