The Bell Witch Mirror Reaper is a highly acclaimed concept album released by the American band, Bell Witch. The album, which spans over 80 minutes, is a progressive doom metal masterpiece that explores themes of grief, loss, and acceptance. The Mirror Reaper is divided into two parts, aptly titled "Mirror" and "Reaper." Each part represents a distinct phase of the grieving process, with "Mirror" symbolizing introspection and "Reaper" symbolizing letting go. The album's sonic landscape is haunting and dense, characterized by slow, droning guitar riffs, sparse drums, and ethereal vocals. Bell Witch's ability to create an atmosphere of melancholy and despair is unparalleled, drawing listeners into the emotional depths of the music.
Mirror Reaper
Seattle doom metal duo Bell Witch’s third album sounds broken down by life and death alike, but it scrapes together something like hope.
Facebook Email PinterestSeattle doom metal duo Bell Witch’s first two albums engaged fearlessly with themes of death and transience. Their 2015 release Four Phantoms even got into the grisly details, envisioning ghosts dying for all eternity by each of the four elements: buried alive in earth, burnt at the stake, drowning in a river, and falling into winds so harsh they tear the skin off the dead. That album’s fantastical details and grandiose scope painted death as something inevitable, but easier to imagine as a fable than as reality. On their third album, Mirror Reaper, Bell Witch sound broken down by life and death alike. It’s their first album since the death of drummer and founding member Adrian Guerra, who passed away in 2016, and so their first album written in the blunt light of public grief. Having hit the bottom of their reserve, they spend the record scraping together something like hope.
Arranged as a single 83-minute track, Mirror Reaper steps back from the resplendent gestures that swept across Four Phantoms. Each beat of Jesse Shreibman’s drum kit, each throb of Dylan Desmond’s six-string bass sounds labored, as though they’ve had to drag the sounds out like lead hammers. Doom metal works with fewer notes at a time than thrash or death metal, so the key to its emotional power is to pour everything you’ve got into each one. Bell Witch do just that in Mirror Reaper’s quiet moments, which are more abundant than their previous albums, and also in its loud ones, where Shreibman lurches forward one kick of the bass drum at a time and Desmond carves mournful leads out of his extra wide fretboard.
Few bassists can make their instrument sing quite like Desmond. About 33 minutes into Mirror Reaper, he climbs a crescendo that, in its tone and its simplicity, sounds like a human voice singing a funeral hymn to itself. He exploits the upper range of his bass, digging out emotional extremes from the notes that could be mapped onto the low end of an electric guitar if they weren’t quite so rich with overtones. He’s newly joined by the sounds of Shreibman’s Hammond B3 organ, whose chords tangle with the distortion on the bass and the echo of the cymbals. Plenty of metal bands play impressively in step, but here, Desmond and Shreibman play as though they are clinging to each other.
Both members of the band sing, as did Desmond and Guerra, and their voices feel both distinct and entwined. Shreibman issues a low, diaphragm-racking growl; between the drummer’s parts, Desmond sings clean, his voice multi-tracked so as to emulate a Gregorian choir. He sounds like he’s standing far from the microphone, and the contrast between his stoic detachment and Shreibman’s visceral roar emphasizes the album’s lyrical themes of duality: between life and death, sorrow and relief, the body and its fleeing ghost.
Halfway through the album, Guerra’s voice appears, too, in a sequence the band has titled “The Words of the Dead.” These screams were recorded for, and cut from, Four Phantoms, and they form the living emotional core of Mirror Reaper. Here is where the tension of the album’s first side climaxes, where life and death seem to pierce each other. Guerra is dead, and he is singing with his former band; they are mourning him and they are with him at the same time. Then the cresting waves of sound fall away, and on Mirror Reaper’s second side, Shreibman and Desmond wade through acres of empty space. Their instruments echo into beats of silence. The loss of their friend bores holes in the music itself.
Mirror Reaper’s stark final act, which features lyrics sung by the band’s continuing collaborator Erik Moggridge, ranks among the loveliest and saddest moments the band has recorded. Moggridge’s voice lilts, gentle and devastating, as though he’s crying out for someone, anyone, to hear him, as though he’s not sure there’s another living soul on the scorched earth. When Desmond answers him and the drums clatter back in, the feeling only multiplies. It’s like the emptiness grows once there are more people to feel it.
Mourning overwhelms the mourner; it often feels as though it is the whole world. Mirror Reaper simulates that totality of grief, but it also transcends its own function as a eulogy. That hope that Bell Witch scrape together by the end? It’s the kind that emerges once everything in your periphery has been burnt to the ground and you, somehow, still exist. You exist, and you get up, and you walk in whatever direction you’re most likely to find light.
Album Of The Week: Bell Witch Mirror Reaper
There’s precedent — not a lot, but some. In 1996, the California doom metal trio Sleep put together Dopesmoker, a whole album that consisted of one slow, repetitive, atmospheric hour-long song. London Records, the band’s label, had no idea how to sell it, so it stayed unreleased for three years; a smaller label finally released it years after the band’s breakup. These days, the band gets back together every so often to perform that albums in full at festivals. And metal, like jazz or experimental, is one of those few genres where people take themselves seriously enough to record really, really long tracks and then to release those tracks as albums. In the past, people like Jesu, Pig Destroyer, and Boris have done it, as have non-metal types like Brian Eno and Jim O’Rourke. Still, I’ve never heard anything quite like Mirror Reaper, the overwhelming, suffocating, brain-rearranging new piece of music from the Seattle drone-metal duo Bell Witch. Its one song is 83 minutes long, and those 83 minutes are enough to fuck with your entire concept of time.
Mirror Reaper is a heavy album, but for most of its long running time, it’s not an especially loud or brutal one. The sound is open and spacious. Much of the melody is in the bass, which is warm and plummy and only rarely distorted. There’s a lot of organ-sustain, a lot of cymbal washes. All of it sounds immaculate. Producer Billy Anderson has worked with people like Neurosis and Swans; he knows how to help a band convey darkness and grandeur. And darkness and grandeur are what Mirror Reaper has to offer. The album plays out like a bleak meditation on things that we can’t possibly know, a giving-up of control. It’s only really a doom metal album by association. A lot of the time, all you can hear is a lonely organ or a murmuring bass. The singing is either a subverbal shudder-grunt or a high, lost, fragile tenor from frequent guest Erik Moggridge. And when the band does lock into a louder, heavier part, they ease themselves into it so gradually that you only really notice when you’re already in it. They play so slowly that it almost doesn’t sound like a groove; it just sounds like a crashing enormity of emptiness.
The band members had a lot to think about when they were making the album. Last year, Adrian Guerra, the drummer and singer who helped form Bell Witch in 2010 and who’d left the band in 2015, died at the age of 35. Some of his unused vocal tracks from the band’s last album, 2015’s Four Phantoms, show up on Mirror Reaper. And the members of the band say that Mirror Reaper is an album about the dichotomy of life and death, the way they’re ultimately two halves of one whole. You might not get that from the album’s lyrics, which basically, for me, fade into nothingness even when I can understand them. But you can totally get it from the album’s feeling, from the way it hints at unknowns, at vast chasms of nothingness. Bell Witch have made heavy music before; their last two albums were full of intense and zoned-out 20-minute songs. But they haven’t made music that can completely sweep you away like this, music that can force you to live inside your own heads.
To get lost in Mirror Reaper is to forget about things like time or musical structure. You know when you’re at the beach, when you swim out far enough that you can’t touch ground anymore? It’s like that. You’re on your own. You can’t hear anyone, and you might not be able to see anyone either. All you see are these far-off waves swelling up, getting ready to crash down on you. All you can feel are these vast forces pulling on your body, pushing it in different ways. As with the ocean, you have to be at peace with the idea that you’re not in control, that there are forces much larger than you out there, that these forces should be observed and contemplated. To listen to an album like Mirror Reaper is to surrender to it, to let it suck you in. Listening to Mirror Reaper, I’m not thinking about genres or influences or whether I like this album more than the band’s last album. I’m not really thinking anything. I’m just feeling big feelings. Mirror Reaper, as a piece of music, exists somewhere in the beyond. It’s a hell of a place to visit.
Mirror Reaper is out 10/20 on Profound Lore. Stream it below.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Destroyer’s lush, verbose, thoughtful ken.
• Jessie Ware’s smooth, virtuosic, expensive-sounding Glasshouse.
• Bully’s scrappy, gnarly, fun sophomore album Losing.
• Makthaverskan’s fired-up indie-pop riot III.
• Lindstrøm’s expansive, insistent space-disco odyssey It’s Alright Between Us As It Is.
• John Carpenter’s newly-rerecorded movie-theme collection Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998.
• Kllo’s elegantly burbling dance-popper Backwater.
• Young Dolph’s wartime street-rap album Thinking Out Loud.
• Margo Price’s old-school country reverie All American Made.
• Circuit Des Yeux’ experimental mood piece Reaching For Indigo.
• Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah’s trilogy-completing jazz album The Emancipation Procrastination.
• Radiator Hospital’s DIY indie-popper Play The Songs You Like.
• Beach Slang/Quiet Slang’s pared-down We Were Babies & We Were Dirtbags.
• Yellow Eyes’ atmospheric black metaller Immersion Trench Reverie.
• Giraffage’s gauzy, fluid debut Too Real.
• Grooms’ atmospheric-but-muscular Exit Index.
• Way Yes’ melodically adventurous indie-popper Tuna Hair.
• Ryan Power’s harmonically rich They Sell Doomsday.
• Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker’s collaborative album SpiderBeetleBee.
• Nic Fanciulli’s guest-heavy dance album My Heart.
• CID RIM’s krautrock-influenced Material.
• Lean Year’s cinematic self-titled debut.
• Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein’s score for season two of Stranger Things.
• Gwar’s triumphantly silly The Blood Of Gods.
• Kevin Devine’s acoustic reimagining We Are Who We’ve Always Been.
• The Tegan And Sara tribute compilation The Con X: Covers.
• Wild Beasts’ Punch Drunk And Trembling EP.
• Sports and Plush’s split EP.
• Madame Gandhi’s Voices Remix EP.
Reflections of an epic: Bell Witch "Mirror Reaper" review
— 9/10
Doom metal has long been a divisive genre for me, in theory, I love the concept dark, grinding, atmospheric music that is stupidly heavy, yet all too often the music eschews grit and darkness in favour of groove and Ozzy style vocals. Every few years I dip my toe back in the water to see if anything good is happening, for the first time in a long time, that dip has turned into a dive headfirst into Bell Witch’s "Mirror Reaper".
This is what I want my doom to sound like, dark, oppressive and incredibly atmospheric. A stunning behemoth of an album consisting of one song clocking in at a whopping 1hr 23mins, to call it a song though is somewhat of an injustice, it calls to mind classical opus’ where the music contributes to a greater whole full of shifting motifs, rather than established song structures.
One of the words that keeps coming back to me to describe this album is 'tasteful', one of the most intriguing and captivating things about this album is the restraint, everything is measured and calculated to add to the whole as a greater beast. The album’s slow, like really, really slow, which for some will be an instant turn-off due to the lack of apparent riffs, however, it is very rewarding for those willing to stick with it, the interplay by the minimal instruments (just bass, drums, synths, and vocals) creates vast soundscapes interspersed with silence and droning sections that are hugely evocative and full of melancholy.
The album is split into two sections "As Above" and "So Below", the first section of the song is where the most aggressive and driving sections of the album are found giving way to clean vocals and a lighter feel, for "So Below". I definitely favour the first 'movement' but I’m always compelled to finish the album with the emotional resolve the 2nd half brings.
Bell Witch lost one of their members [the drummer and vocalist Adrian Guerra passed away in 2016] in the time between their last release and "Mirror Reaper", and one can’t help but feel the anguish and subsequent catharsis across the 2 major ideas on this album.
A challenging listen that requires attention and patience, its evolving sounds and nuanced composition will reward those up to the challenge. A fantastic album that I’d recommend to anyone that loves doom, atmospheric or challenging/intensive music in general.
Reviewed by Dan
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Bell Witch's ability to create an atmosphere of melancholy and despair is unparalleled, drawing listeners into the emotional depths of the music. Lyrically, the album delves into the existential and philosophical questions surrounding death and the human experience. It explores the concept of mortality and the inevitable cycle of life and death.
The themes of grief and healing are represented through introspective and introspective lyrics that resonate with listeners on a deep emotional level. The Mirror Reaper showcases the band's impressive musicianship and their ability to create long, immersive compositions. The tracks flow seamlessly, with each section building upon the previous one, leading to a climax that is both powerful and emotionally charged. One of the standout moments of the album is the use of choir vocals in "Reaper," which adds an angelic element to the music and enhances the overall atmospheric quality of the album. This unique addition to the band's sound elevates the emotional impact of the songs and creates a captivating listening experience. The Bell Witch Mirror Reaper is not only a musical journey but a cathartic experience for listeners. It encourages deep introspection and contemplation, allowing for a release of emotions and a sense of solace in the face of grief. Overall, the Bell Witch Mirror Reaper is a monumental achievement in the world of doom metal. Its profound lyrics, mesmerizing soundscapes, and raw emotional power make it a must-listen for fans of the genre. The album's ability to evoke a wide range of emotions and deeply resonate with listeners is a testament to the band's artistry and storytelling prowess..
Reviews for "The Dualistic Nature of Bell Witch's 'Mirror Reaper': A Review"
1. Sarah - 2 stars - I had high hopes for "Bell Witch Mirror Reaper," but I was sorely disappointed. The album lacks any variation or excitement. The droning, repetitive nature of the songs became monotonous and tedious after only a few minutes. It felt like I was trapped in an endless loop of slow, heavy riffs and mournful vocals. The album failed to engage me emotionally or mentally, and I ultimately found it to be a forgettable and uninspiring listening experience.
2. John - 1 star - "Bell Witch Mirror Reaper" is an absolute snooze fest. The album is over an hour long, and for the most part, it comprises of nothing but slow, plodding dirges that seem to go on forever. The lack of energy and dynamism makes it incredibly difficult to stay engaged or interested in the music. I kept waiting for something to happen, for a change in the pace or the addition of some interesting elements, but it never came. Overall, I found this album to be an incredibly tedious and draining listen.
3. Emily - 2 stars - I can appreciate the musical skill and talent that went into creating "Bell Witch Mirror Reaper," but it simply wasn't my cup of tea. The album is overwhelmingly long and repetitive, with each song blending into the next. The lack of variation or memorable melodies made it difficult for me to stay engaged throughout the entire album. While I can see how some listeners might find beauty in the melancholic atmosphere, it ultimately left me feeling bored and unmoved. I wouldn't recommend this album to anyone looking for a more dynamic and engaging listening experience.
4. David - 2.5 stars - "Bell Witch Mirror Reaper" is certainly an ambitious and unique album, but it didn't quite hit the mark for me. The slow, mournful nature of the music can feel oppressive and overwhelming, and the album's hour-plus runtime doesn't help in that regard. While there are moments of beauty and emotional depth within the songs, they often get lost in a sea of monotonous droning. This is the kind of album that requires a specific headspace and mood to fully appreciate, but unfortunately, it didn't resonate with me as much as I had hoped.