Dream Unending

With their first two albums Dream Unending transformed the familiar architecture of death doom into a place of their own making. A language where cavernous heaviness could coexist with progressive rock, ambient music, jazz-informed improvisation and a disarming emotional candor. On new album Certain Uncertainties that expression remains intact, but its gaze has shifted. Where previous records often seemed to reach upward and outward, this one comes back down to earth: leaner in construction, rougher around the edges and possessed of a distinctly nocturnal atmosphere. Call it Adult Contemporary Doom perhaps; music of considerable weight that has nevertheless learned how much can be said by leaving certain things unsaid.

Recorded with fewer layers and a deliberately more immediate instrumental approach, Certain Uncertainties gives the individual performances room to breathe. Derrick Vella’s guitars move through blues, jazz and progressive vocabulary with unusual freedom, at times carrying the open-ended character of American roots music into territory rarely encountered within doom. Justin DeTore’s drums are present throughout, lending the album a more physical momentum and helping its compositions arrive at their destinations with greater economy. Yet concision has not diminished Dream Unending’s taste for release: the opening and closing pieces in particular build toward enormous pressure points, while the spaces between allow Vella’s playing to wander, react and occasionally remain imperfect. Each song operates as its own vignette; part desert reverie, part after-hours noir; with traces of Western landscape, dim rooms and empty roads running throughout the album.

That earthbound quality suits an album concerned, at its core, with instability and reconstruction. Written during a period in which Vella was rebuilding his own sense of confidence in risk-taking, Certain Uncertainties carries doubt within it without surrendering to despair. The bruised balladry of “I Carry Your Burden,” (featuring guest vocals by Brendan Radigan) the improvisational openness of the title track and the album’s uglier eruptions of death doom all belong to the same emotional terrain: beauty and discomfort allowed to occupy the same frame. If Dream Unending’s earlier work imagined another world beyond the limits of heavy music, Certain Uncertainties finds something equally strange in the one beneath our feet. A record of dry air, long shadows, unresolved questions and the stubborn impulse to keep moving through them.