Village of Dead Roads - Dwelling in Doubt
MeteorCity
Release date: Summer 2006


First the bad - Dwelling in Doubt has too many useless noise tracks (albeit brief ones). It’s the musical equivalent of mashing your peas on your plate in the hopes that it looks like you’ve eaten more than you actually did. I’m all for a little ambience and moodiness here and there, but when five out of twelve tracks are dedicated to nothing in particular, I get the suspicion that the band opted to pad the record just a touch.

It irritates me all the more because the actual songs on Dwelling in Doubt are fantastic. I raved about their four-song demo (of which “Blind Albino,” “Hemingway Solution,” and the noise vignette “Laughter in Hell” return; “Divine Mistake” popped up on the split with Spiritu) last year, and for good reason. When this Erie, PA four-piece sets their mind to it, they come up with some seriously compelling music. “Fugitive,” the first real song on Dwelling in Doubt, is indicative of Village of Dead Road’s strengths. With a slightly off-kilter beat that maintains an aggressive momentum, coupled with the standard throat-of-blood bark and layered guitars, the band paints a bleak yet compelling picture. It’s got the bite of Cavity, the depression of Cable, and the intricacies of Isis.

From there, it gets better. The awesome “Professing to be Wise” and “Between Grace and Delusion” show that the band is also capable of injecting more melodic moments, and “Blind Albino” is a perfect melding of a jackhammer Ministry rhythms and riffs and Sabbath-influenced doom-blues. “Hemingway Solution” jumps from the jagged to the hardcore to the mellow almost as seamlessly, and while album closer “Cold New World” is more conventional in structure than the other tracks, it’s a fitting, somber end to the album.

In the context of the seven “real” songs, Dwelling in Doubt is highly recommended. With all twelve songs, though, expect to hit the skip button. Still, as far as debuts go, this one is up there.

- John Pegoraro