As The Sea Parts – Trilogy Of Sorrow

You cannot imagine how hard it was for me to find this. As The Sea Parts was a doom/death band from Virginia that released only one demo, Trilogy Of Sorrow, before vanishing beneath the waves. I heard the demo was absolutely fantastic, but every search I made was a dead end. The problem was the fact that every single site that posted this album all linked to the same Megaupload file. Long story short, the feds shut down Megaupload and no one bothered to reupload the file to another site. Eventually, my good friend RAF666 uploaded his own rip of the album. I downloaded it and I've been playing it on repeat ever since.

This demo is only three songs long, so there's not a lot to cover, but I'll do my best to convey the music that is played. The first song, “Our Home No More”, begins with the sounds of waves gently hitting the beach which then lead into airy keyboards which transition into slow, melodic riffs. The production is kind of muddled, especially in the drum area, so you'll have to crank up your volume to hear it. Other than that, the music is fantastically composed.

The vocals are your run-of-the-mill growls and screams, but they're well-performed nonetheless. There are also certain moments when Paul Vanderslice performs these clean spoken vocals. I don't really like them – they don't really have any energy behind them – but the rest of the music makes up for it. Due to the muddy production, you can hardly hear the bass, but it manages to pop out at times, especially one the last song. The drums play slow and simple rhythms, but with doom/death, that's pretty much all you need.

The keyboards appear from time to time to reinforce the mystical atmosphere of the album. Like all the other instruments, they do their job just fine. The best element of this album would have to be the guitars. They have a rather melodic tone and play some catchy riffs. There are even times when they break into a slow solo that really grabs your attention, like a giant wave slamming into the coastal rocks.

Despite some of the flaws it has, this little demo was definitely worth the work I put into finding it. As with many other bands, it's unfortunate that they released only one demo before vanishing into obscurity. Some say that this band is still active, but they haven't released anything new. I wonder what they're up to.