‘Dreaming Delusion’ is an interesting album by the band Gloombound I’ve been enjoying. It has lots going on with a very cosmic sounding atmosphere and a gargantuan sense of scale like being on a small boat and a tower sized wave is about to crash down on you. The Norwegians flex well-written and glacially paced material here and present it with a sense of majesty.
Synths and heavy fuzzed out guitars crash down like falling stars. The organ sounds fantastic and is an active entity as opposed to window dressing, possessing a haunting, looming presence like a ghost. Generally across the album there is satisfying, nearly psychedelic synth playing which has a great presence in the mix. The drums are thick and cold like an icy waterfall and provide a foundation to this frozen world.
Mixing brutal and dark metal with beautiful fading sunset music which sounds like a pleasant memory as you slip away into another life with a thunderstorm raging on distantly. The dried out husk vocals sound like they came from a desiccated zombie that’s been dug up from a sand dune. The bass tone is fresh and clear, the tone sounds like a fretless at some points like midway through “An Eternity of Complete Acquiescence’. (Note: It is in fact a fretless bass used on this album I have discovered, very cool.)
There are ponderous, reflective passages throughout, like during the second half of the opener ‘At the Precipice to Longinquity’ where the synth leads intermingle with guitar. Acoustic guitar segments that propose trailing comets and fragments of a faraway place add some dimension. Strings appear as well and stood out quite a bit later on in the back half of the album’s duration particularly on the over 15 minute epic title track that ends the work.
The sensation of getting lost in a pyramid slipping into madness with voices and mummies in pursuit. I recommend this to Doom fans who want an ethereal touch in a way that doesn’t interfere with or sacrifice the foundation of heaviness. Excellent stuff from this band and a nice longer follow up to 2023’s “Astral Exhalation’.
