Album review: Warning – Rituals Of Shame

In the two decades since their last album, Watching From A Distance, Warning’s name has become a byword for music drowning in emotion, heaviness hewn from the deepest parts of a person.

Released on a genuinely underground doom metal label, Miskatonic, and seemingly happy enough to be a cult concern, through the most organic word of mouth and stunning reputation the intervening years have found Warning blossoming into one of British metal’s most beloved bands, and frontman Patrick Walker into an iconic figure of intrigue himself.

Twenty years, one hiatus, a new band (40 Watt Sun), and a much increased profile later, we finally have a third album. Though it’s impossible to relive hearing the bereft beauty of Footprints or Bridges for the first time, Rituals Of Shame comes ever so close. The forlorn yet florid guitars that introduce the titular opener carry that same weight, without being a photocopy. Landing Lights is a gorgeously spacious lament, while on Night Comes Down, they touch on a similarly endless, empty sonic horizon as German doomsters Ahab.

As much as their unique style of doom, it is the self-evident, immediate sense of emotion and openness that makes Warning what they are. Rare are the band whose music alone articulates a river of man-feelings as effectively as this. Even taken a line at a time as individual words and phrases, Patrick’s vocals on top of all this make it a heart-pulling work. ‘The darkness grew so strong, it even moved the stars to try to find a place to hide’ he sings on Night Comes Down. ‘You learn to live with it / But how did ever I believe it so long as the whole and total expression of love?’ Whether you know the specifics, you will feel it as your own.

Crucially, as with Watching From A Distance (and, indeed, The Strength To Dream before it), the desperation of the emotion and swelling feelings isn’t voyeuristic. You’re not simply watching someone have a terrible one. There’s a closeness, a shared thing that doesn’t pull you in so much as embrace you on a frequency that’s entirely yours.

It also takes you with it as it pitches and yaws. Much as it can accompany isolated melancholy, on moments like when closer Teacher wraps up and picks up to a genuinely glorious, unexpectedly uplifting ending, it is impossible not to feel the power of it almost physically lifting you.

It is a risk to add to a legacy so special to people as Warning’s. What they’ve done with Rituals Of Shame is nothing short of miraculous. It doesn't tightrope walk those past glories. It stands on its own next to them, proudly its own thing, with its most real and vulnerable aspects just as perfectly expressed.

Verdict: 5/5

For fans of: Pallbearer, YOB, Ahab

Rituals Of Shame is out now via Relapse.

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