My Heart, An Inverted Flame

A wave of lunar heaviosity, My Death Is More Beautiful Than Your Life is the sophomore album from the duo of drummer Andee Connors (A Minor Forest, Common Eider, King Eider, P.E.E., J-Church, aQuarius recOrds) and synth / electronics / vocalist Marc Kate (I Am Spoonbender, Never Knows), delivering another slab of their signature tectonic synth-doom. In spite of what appears to be a spare sound pallette and dispensing with the use of guitar and bass, MHAIF's sound is utterly immense and wrought in dark emotional intensity, sprawling across nearly eighty minutes of morose slow-motion grandeur. The ten songs lumber through the duo's signature haze of electronic luminescence and earth-shifting percusion, crafting each one into a massive slab of ultra-heavy glacial drift. It would be too simple to describe this as "drone metal"—My Heart, An Inverted Flame evoke a moonswept ambience that offers something more lush and radiant, lending moments of dreamlike beauty to the gravitational crush. Likewise, this transcends the banner of doom metal; while Connors flattens everything in sight with his colossal sledgehammer drumming, the blown-out electronic textures of Kate's synthesizers and FX delirium pulls the sound into a kind of cosmos-devouring psychedelia, with swells of saturated cinematic majesty billowing across the rupturing percussive dirge.

The drums thunder in the deep, laying down monumental backbeat awash in swirling, squealing, searing electronic noise and howling Berlin School-esque melodic forms. But they also roll and stutter monstrously, Connors rending the blackness with sudden bursts of seemingly freeform power as often as he locks into a mesmeric slowcore groove or bone-shattering dirge. Between the active percussive blast and epic choral synth on tracks like "My Body, My Problem", the evil distant screams that float through "You. Alone.", and the stop-start caveman hammer of "Necrosomethingology", the band evokes deep, dolorous depths of black drift, hyper-distorted drones, over-modulated glitch, and gut-rupturing earthquake reverberations. This stuff is heavy as hell, but powered by an occasional Teutonic drive that immerses the lumbering weight in a hypnotic haze that emits its own unique effect. This is brought full force on the eighteen-minute saga "No And Never", where MHAIF push into an agonizingly propulsive magma groove that brings all of the album's most hypnotic elements together in grandiose style.