maudlin of the WELL: Bath/Leaving Your Body Map

Released: 2001

maudlin of the Well was a group that was able to take all of the various aspects of modern music and weave them into a fragile tapestry of sounds and textures. Bath and Leaving Your Body Map was a double-release from the amazing nine-piece band, whose style was perhaps best described by their own definition of "astral metal", a kind of progressive ambient doom death that at times came close to that of Opeth with shades of My Dying Bride and diISEMBOWELMENT, but also really unlike any of them.

As companion volumes that were released together, it would be nigh on impossible to review them separately, and as it is each of them flow into one another like the waters of two streams forging a river. The gentler strains of Bath build a complex and enchanting kaleidoscope of delicately interwoven techniques and sounds that takes the listener on the first part of a transcendental musical voyage of emotion and introspection. Leaving Your Body Map is darker and heavier, but not without its own ethereal moments and without ever once losing sight of maudlin of the Well's vision of incredible musical beauty.

Delicately balancing all of their instrumental and vocal parts, maudlin of the Well is one moment heavy and blasting with double-time double-kicks and grim vocals, and the next enchanting acoustic melancholia, easing through snatches of swing, jazz and melodic electric guitar and trancy instrumentals with symbols for names before stepping out into crushing extremity once again.

These are possibly two of the finest albums of progressive metal to have ever seen the light. maudlin of the Well was a truly innovative and amazing musical entity that fully explored every facet of their ingenuity with brilliant results. Shortly after these albums were released, about half the group formed Kayo Dot, a band that now contains only Toby Driver from this line-up, and has moved almost completely away from metal altogether.

Bath:

1. The Blue Ghost/Shedding Qliphoth
2. They Aren't All Beautiful
3. Heaven and Weak
4. Interlude
5. The Ferryman
6. Marid's Gift of Art
7. Girl With a Watering Can
8. Birth Pains of Astral Projection
9. Interlude
10. Geography

Leaving My Body Map:

1. Stones Of October's Sobbing
2. Gleam in Ranks
3. Bizarre Flowers/A Violent Mist
4. Interlude
5. The Curve That to an Angle Turn'd
6. Sleep is a Curse
7. Riseth He, the Numberless
8. Interlude
9. Monstrously Low Tide

Rating: 96%