Review: Godthrymm – Projections
The third album from the Halifax doom band closes a trilogy built on the language of light, and hands its songs from one singer to the next. Strong, heavy and varied, with a handful of moments that lift above the rest.
Godthrymm came together in Halifax in 2017, founded by Hamish Glencross, who played guitar in My Dying Bride and Vallenfyre and in Solstice, and Shaun Taylor-Steels, who drummed for My Dying Bride and Anathema. The band translate their name as divine force, god joined to the Old English thrymm, the glory or might invoked in the opening lines of Beowulf, the oldest epic poem in English. Catherine Glencross plays keys and sings, Bob Crolla holds the bass, and across six years the band has made three albums named for something light does, Reflections in 2020, Distortions in 2023, and now Projections, the record that closes the Visions trilogy.
The three titles run on one idea. A reflection returns your own image, a distortion bends it, and a projection throws it outward onto something else. Projections closes the arc by turning outward, and it does that through its voices. Glencross sings lead, his wife Catherine carries two songs alone, and guests arrive to take others, so a single band reaches the listener through many mouths.
“Trenches Deep” opens in doomed glory and states the method in one song. The procession holds until Taylor-Steels breaks the tempo into a charge, and two outside voices ride it, Adie Bailey of the punk band English Dogs and Jay Walsh of the thrash band Xentrix, before the grandeur returns. It is the most ambitious thing here, and one of the best.
“Truth In My Own” settles into classic heavy doom, groove at a low pace, with Catherine singing against the riff in a balance that stays delicate and keeps clear of the kitsch that often sinks lighter voices in this music. The same balance carries her through “Jewels” and “Hope Is Eternal,” and through the dreamlike “Epilogue” that closes the digital edition.
“The Sun Never Fell” is the album’s surprise. Glencross roughens his voice into a register out of 1992, somewhere near nineties Metallica and Alice in Chains, and the effect is Paradise Lost, the other Halifax band, rerouted through Seattle grunge. It is the track that stays with you.
“Endure My Skin” opens in the manner of Candlemass, the Swedish band that codified epic doom in the eighties, and brings in Aaron Stainthorpe, who fronted My Dying Bride from 1990 until his recent departure. He carries the song while harsher vocals surface around him, and the pairing of his voice with Glencross and Taylor-Steels, his former bandmates, is the album’s other clear high point.
The variety of voices over heavy, well-built doom gives the record its character, and the band handles it with ease. This is doom working confidently inside its own tradition. A few of the back-half songs sit at a steady level while the highlights climb above them, and Projections is a strong, generous album from a band sure of what it is. The best of it rewards the listen. Recommended!
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