Boston quartet Morne has, to date, used its discography like a very public workshop. The band spent the first several years of its existence constructing an elaborate and involved monument of their metallic interests. Their debut, 2009’s Untold Wait, swiveled from lumbering stomp to swooping strings, all during a thesis-like 10-minute opener. Subsequent tracks raced through caustic punk sprints or lurched through swampy mid-tempo charges; they crawled along an elegant doom arc, only to emerge into recalcitrant, noisy rumbles gilded by strings and electronics.
If the first four years in the Morne workshop were about building something ornate, however, the last four years have been about not deconstruction so much as simply removing stylistic excess. Morne have attempted to refine the foundation beneath the indulgence. Their debut for Profound Lore, 2011’s Asylum, trimmed much of the up-tempo aggression, ensconcing even their outbursts in sounds that were slower, steadier and heavier. During closer “Volition”, Jarboe added her ghastly coo above weepy piano and strings. In the song’s final third, the delicacy yielded to an incandescent, electric smolder that was at once grim and meticulous. After six years and two albums, Morne had finally arrived at their essence-- a refined and molten sort of doom, capable of sudden and surprising detours.
As the dimly lit name and colony-of-cobwebs cover suggests, Shadows, Morne’s third album, slinks deeper into doom. They trim the track list to five songs and stretch three of the numbers beyond the 10-minute mark; for comparison’s sake, Asylum and Untold Wait included seven tracks each and a collective total of only three quadruple-digit running times. Opener “Coming of Winter” begins with a roar of monolithic amplifier consonance, a flood of sound emptying into a void. The motion eventually rises into a half-time charge of seesaw melodies and sandpaper screams, a black mass of stepwise accretion. Indeed, most every piece of Shadows follows this generalized stratagem of starting slow and low but steadily escalating into organized upheaval. “A Distance” first wafts through a web of alien electronics and desolate riffs, anchored by a militaristic drum tromp. But the song’s midsection browbeats with sluggish thrash, a heavyweight attempting to summon a featherweight’s agility. “New Dawn” first feels like an attempt to crush with sheer sonics, with surges of distorted bass collapsing atop circular guitar and a simple drum kit plod; as the track accelerates, however, Morne suggests a refined Dopesmoker, the band orbiting a memorable theme like it’s a mantra. Despite these consistent shifts from near-silence to sizable roar, Shadows’ dynamic range seems nonexistent by album’s end, largely because Morne is incapable of pushing past the mold it has set for itself. In their quest to define their sound, Morne forgot to allow room for deviation. To wit, the instrumental closer mostly functions as a standard album track only without words. Morne gets trapped by how they hope to sound.
Given the minimizing trend of their three-album output, Morne ostensibly wants to be a doom band and to elide the obvious intricacies and complications of their earlier work for something more singular and settled. They’ve at least achieved that much on Shadows, a subgenre telegraph that genuflects to a form’s customs while simply nodding toward their own previous interests. As they’ve dove deeper into doom’s nearly still waters, they’ve lost some of their imagination and energy. Much of Shadows feels like it’s following pre-ordained charts and graphs, and it often seems like the band’s working too much here, trudging through what used to be enjoyable. It’s heavy but weightless, then, limping along on the surface but barely leaving a mark. “Pleasant” or “fine” aren’t words you’d generally associate with a band deliberately realigning itself with dirge sculptors such as Evoken or Thergothon, bands whose extreme subservience to an idea about how they should sound makes them polarizing nearly a quarter-century after they began. But with Shadows, Morne has become a perfectly pleasant doom band, turning the soundtrack of nightmares into little more than fine background music. Even on leaden wings, Shadows floats up and away as soon as its 50 minutes are done.
