Bell Witch operate at a tempo most bands would find unusable and have turned it into a complete compositional philosophy. Dylan Desmond on bass and Jesse Sheeran on drums, a duo, technically, though Erik Moggridge (Aerial Ruin) has been their vocal collaborator since Stygian Bough Volume I in 2020, make funeral doom that treats slowness not as a limitation but as a medium. Stygian Bough Volume II continues that project: four tracks across roughly an hour, each one a complete world that unfolds at its own pace.
“Waves Became the Sky” opens the record with the album’s longest stretch, a guitar figure (Desmond plays bass in a register that doubles as lead instrument) that circles and deepens before Moggridge’s voice enters, clean and high against the dense low-end. The contrast is the whole technique: the voice is frail against the weight beneath it, which gives every vocal line the quality of something surviving rather than something performing. “King of the Wood” is the album’s most developed piece, moving through distinct sections without losing the thread, the kind of composition that would fall apart if any element were adjusted, and holds because every element has been placed exactly right.
“From Dominion” introduces a more abrasive quality midway through the record, the guitars move into harsher territory before pulling back, which the album needs at this point to maintain its emotional range. “The Told and the Leadened” closes with the most resolved moment on the record, a closing that doesn’t offer comfort but does offer something like arrival.
The production is cavernous in the right way, deep low-end that doesn’t blur, guitars with a natural resonance that sustains without feedback, drums that sound enormous and deliberate in a space that matches them. Moggridge’s vocals are recorded dry against the wet reverb of the instruments, which preserves their human fragility against the scale of everything surrounding them. This is the right decision: Bell Witch’s music is about scale and intimacy simultaneously, and the production captures both.
Standout tracks: Waves Became the Sky, King of the Wood, The Told and the Leadened
Bell Witch remain among the small number of funeral doom bands for whom the format’s constraints are genuinely generative rather than limiting. Stygian Bough Volume II earns its hour. All of it.
