Bell Witch – Mirror Reaper (Review)

Bell Witch are a doom band from the US and this is their third album.

My my, what do we have here? One single colossally sprawling slab of grim funeral doom that lasts a monolithic 83 minutes? Yes please!

This is the darkest and most terrifyingly harrowing of funeral doom. Mirror Reaper is a highly emotive and affecting listen, with the obvious hard work that the band have undertaken paying off big time.

As you would expect for a release of this length, Bell Witch have put a lot of effort and blood into Mirror Reaper. Not content with merely crushing the listener into a fine paste with its significant weight, the band also make sure to include many different lighter and shaded sections to ensure that there’s more than enough bleak atmosphere and dark despondency to emotionally drain their audience too.

Parts of this release sound immediate and threatening, while in other sections everything seems to retreat, leaving a lonely, desolate landscape, populated purely by despair and isolated pain. The feeling of loss and tragedy is strong across this work, and the music is highly effective at transmitting the band’s emotional intentions with real force.

The music develops with great space and texture, despite its largely one track mind; this is all about channelling deep, painful emotions to hopefully achieve some form of catharsis. Whether this actually happens or not for the band members is unknown, but the listener is certainly left drained, spent, and empty at the end of the lengthy playing time.

With heartrending emotive impact and utterly absorbing soundscape crafting, Mirror Reaper is a superlative piece of work, one which I feel quite justified in calling a doom metal masterpiece.