Some records sometimes take a little longer to sink into the RMR crew’s consciousness. And often the time must be right for them to get a review. Tomorrow’s Rain‘s Ovdan1 sailed about the sumpy depths of our review pipe for a while in search of an exit. But – the Review Desk’s been busy busting the nuts of Extreme Metal folks of the smelly underbelly of the metal multiverse. So, we now seem to be in sensory overload and ready for a welcome bit of moody blues, some thoughtful woeful soul, and melancholy galore. Ovdan is here and woe’s terrible musings lie straight before us.
The gazillionth attempt is the charm, right? You gotta be in the mood for that kind of record or a review will bring you naught. And true to its credo, once the saxophone-laden Roads takes off, an avalanche of comfortable melancholy already engulfs you like a soppy envelope. In a way, this song always reminded us of the wistful sorrow Dawnwalker’s House of Sand displayed. It is not exactly the same setting, agreed, but you get the same hopeless feeling the moment the album gets going.
Tomorrow’s Rain also injected a fair amount of what The Reticent did with his progressively-laced first record. It is this hot and cold treatment, this up and down, this change from unplugged Post Metal to Melodic Death that carries the record’s message. The sudden and often brutal shifts in style, mood, texture, and emotion. That is the message of Ovdan, its essence it will live and die with.
Yet, while all this is pleasantly common ground with a lot of promise, the band went out of its way to invite five guest contributors to the party. In other words, five out of ten tracks feature an outside artist, which is massive. Now, that can be a good thing in itself, if integrated correctly. Yet on Ovdan and given the different vocal styles, it led to a somewhat bumpy ride. And this – again – confirms itself in an uneven rating scale for the individual tracks.2 For instance, plugging Mayhem’s Attila Csihar onto the delicately written Muaka always left us with a vision of a snarling beast on top of a wispy decaying body. And that didn’t work quite that well, I daresay. Now, compare that with the totally different Roads and you get our drift.
And for (too) long stretches on this meandering road to tribulation, Ovdan sounds like an early Rise to the Sky record with its merciless doomy roars (Room 124, for example). The album again loses itself into often tasty ambient and acoustic passages, ice-cold atmospheres, and sudden eruptions of vile, gritty metal. And the gothic melancholy of Burning Times almost got the better of us. An excursion into doom ‘n’ gloom that would have sat well with any of the Peaceville Three.
And don’t get me wrong, Ovdan is a fine piece of progressive doom. One with airs reaching into the alternative realm without the elitist airs of some of today’s out-of-control prog masters. A record that’s as harshly brutal as it can be hauntingly woeful. And yet, despite the band’s undeniably good ideas, the record does somehow not quite sync. It may well be the overly large selection of guest artists that won’t fit too well. Or the lengthy airplay that would have benefitted from some pretty hefty culling.
Lastly, Ovdan is one of these records that turned out differently upon review. The RMR crew fully expected a disjointed catastrophe of sorts. Instead, we found a finely-laced, often silky, and intricately-tuned secret garden full of powerful emotions, moods, and flavors. It takes some chutzpa to offer up this much sentiment in one blurb. So, we stand corrected. Only after a deep dive into the innards of this record did the piece reveal its inherent tear-drenched beauty.
But – to get to greatness, Tomorrow’s Rain need to kick it up a few notches. Spit, polish, and an awful lot of thorny extra quality work will be needed to get there. And I, for one, am confident that they will succeed for their next record. Don’t prove me wrong.
Record Rating: 6/10 | Label: AOP Records | Web: Official Band Site
Release Date: 19 April 2024