Mirrored Confessions – Pendulous
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Coming from Los Angeles, Pendulous are a brand new doom act making their debut with their Mirrored Confessions EP. Pendulous play the style of doom that I enjoy a lot. Slow, mournful, depressing without ever forgetting to deliver the right amount of heaviness into their music by simply mixing some contemporary doom elements with some classic ones. Although Mirrored Confessions features 4 tracks in its alignment, only two of them are really songs. Besides that, we have an Intro and an Outro.

It starts with “Disheveled,” an intro that is served as a very introspective monologue, it instantly brings to my mind “Weathering The Blight,” the intro track from Loss taken from the magnificent album Despond. If you hear both track, you will probably find some resemblances. It has that same cold and gloomy atmosphere where we imagine someone alone in a very dark room looking to its own reflection in a old mirror that stands before him, as we hear his thoughts loudly echoing through the room.

“Reflections” begins with some shy, distant guitar notes that don’t stretch too long, until an avalanche of doom collapses right before us. The anguished and “clean” side of E.R.M’s voice, you’re either gonna love it or hate it, the thing is that it fits really well here. The bipolarity of the vocal work varies between a more clean, but still tortured enough, kind of voice, carrying out that tone we are used to hear within a more classic doom outfits, like, for example, My Dying Bride or (pulling out a more contemporary act) Pallbearer, and a guttural, cavernous voice in the vein of a Loss, Lycus or Aldebaran. Moreover, throughout the nearly 10 minutes that this track lasts, it’s pure funeral doom. Slow rhythms that move at a almost a funeral pace, exalting nothing but sorrow and grief.

“Seeds” is clearly my favorite song here. Tearing out under a more dynamic pace, this track surprises us in its middle with a short instrumental moment. Sounding quite introspective and minimalist, it gives this track another energy, making it more interesting and not so boring (“boring”, a very dreaded word when it comes speaking of doom metal where the songs usually are, at least, about 6 or more minutes long). Despite being a song that contains such different tempos, in the end, the result comes out very nice and quite enjoyable. The variations of the voice, the background howls and echoes turn out to be quite a decisive factor that make this track so good.

“Mirrored Confessions” closes with the outro “Mislaid.” That creepy old grandfather clock sound brings me back to my childhood, where my neighbors had a clock like that and I was constantly awoken in the middle of the night due to its noise. Urrghh… Here we hear the same kind of monologue we heard in the opening and with this another page of this depressing diary is closed. For now.

I really enjoyed this EP from Pendulous – the tracks are really great, the whole production sounds quite good and it’s well performed. It seems we have another player in the US doom scene. Look forward to hear more of this band. Great release. So far there’s no news about a physical release, but I guess it may be in available soon. Check out the band’s Facebook for upcoming news, tour, etc.

Highly recommended for fans of Lycus, Loss, Pallbearer, Aldebaran. My Dying Bride and other doom outfits that may fit in this bag.