Bandcamp The sleeve of A Farewell In Stages is a detail from Gustave Doré’s 1866 engraving “Naomi and her Daughters-in-Law”, and the choice of detail is the whole record in one decision. In Doré’s full image there are three women. Naomi and Ruth are locked in an embrace, because Ruth has just refused to go home. The third, Orpah, has already said her goodbye and is walking away with her hands over her face. Discouraged cropped the embrace out. What survives on the cover is a single veiled figure, alone on a slope above the water, mid-departure.
Eight tracks, and they are titled like a sequence rather than a collection: “Insomnia”, “Descension”, “Waves (Dark is the Sea)”, “For All Things Will Die”, “Traces”, “All Hope Is Gone”, “Emptiness (Haunted House)”, “Farewell”. That is not a tracklist, it is an order of events, and a band naming their debut after a staged goodbye has set themselves a structural test rather than just a mood.
They mostly pass it. “Insomnia” spends its first forty seconds on clean picking, close and quiet, before the weight arrives, and the album keeps returning to that gesture: something small, then the collapse. “Farewell” closes the record by bracketing its heaviest stretch between transparent acoustic guitars at either end, which is the same move as the opener played backwards. The record ends where it started, quietly, and the space between is the part that hurts.
The production is built for that and it is worth dwelling on, because it is doing something more interesting than being heavy. This is a cavernous, reverb-heavy mix with the weight sitting in the low middle, the snare trailing a long tail that reads as a large stone room, and the kick working through the body rather than through a clicked front edge. The growls are the key decision: they are pitched extremely low and placed inside the reverb rather than on top of the mix, so the voice arrives from underneath the music instead of in front of it. That should cost intelligibility and mostly does not, which is harder to pull off than it sounds. On “Waves (Dark is the Sea)” and “All Hope Is Gone” the band swap the growl for whispering and spoken passages, and the shift in proximity does more work than another riff would have.
Where the genre lineage shows is in the low end. The bass merges almost completely with the rhythm guitars into one sub-frequency mass, and on the densest passages the region around 150 to 350 Hz gets woolly. It would be easy to file that as a fault, and it is not: the records Discouraged name as their reference points, the early Anathema and Paradise Lost and Katatonia material, do exactly this, and a death doom bass that thickens the guitars rather than standing beside them is the tradition, not a miss. “For All Things Will Die” is the clearest case, the bass fully dissolved into the wall for maximum pressure and less note definition, and it is the right trade for that song.
The one place the spell breaks is “Traces”. It arrives synth-forward and mastered hard against the limiter, the kit suddenly reading as machined rather than played, with a dominant clicked attack under fast double-bass and high screams up top. Taken alone it is a perfectly good modern death doom track. Sitting fifth in a sequence this committed to sounding like a room, it is the one moment where the album stops being a place and starts being a production.
For a first album the writing discipline is the surprising part. Members here come out of Crypts, The Infernal Deceit and Goodbye Old Me, so the playing was never going to be the question, but restraint usually is on a debut, and nobody here reaches for a solo to fill a gap. Forty-six minutes, eight stages, and a band that understood the assignment they gave themselves.
“Insomnia” sets the method with forty seconds of close clean picking before the drop, and the snare tail that follows establishes the room the rest of the album lives in. “Farewell” is the most dynamically complete track, transparent acoustics at both ends and no sign of the master being pushed to meet the middle. “For All Things Will Die” has the fewest dynamic steps on the record, a sustained wall rather than a swing, and it is the one track where a sharper kick attack is needed to stay locatable inside that much reverb. “Traces” is the outlier on every measure: the loudest master, the tightest kit, the only one with synth pads competing in the low mids.
Standout tracks: Farewell, Insomnia, Emptiness (Haunted House)
