Never in my life have I heard something powerful, surreal, ominous, and right to the bone into the solemn abyss of terror, waiting to be discovered. Tribunal, a Vancouver, British Columbia-based orchestral doom quintet has been around for nearly seven years after unleashing their 2023 debut EP release The Weight of Remembrance. This is a band that know their gothic strategy’s and delving deeper into the void that’s waiting for them in their latest release In Penitence and Ruin.
Released on the 20 Buck Spin label, Tribunal have really up their ante by taking massive amounts of classical music, strings, percussion, and horror-like scores waiting to be unveiled for the public to see. The album itself is a conceptual piece, detailing themes that form on a cycle that ruminates justice and punishment, centred on a guilty penitent who can’t escape from the torture, abuse, and damage they had done.
Between the tragic vocal lines of Soren Mourne and the growling structures of Etienne Flinn, the album is definitely to be played in a darkened room with candles filling the entire area. Listening to the album, it made me go back and think of bands who had come out of Canada.
From Black Mountain, VOIVOD, Crown Lands, Blood Ceremony, Rush, Harmonium, Tumbleweed Dealer, and Maniege to the dooming worlds of Candlemass, Electric Wizard, Cathedral, and The Gates of Slumber, Tribunal fit right in that category when it comes to the terror that’s right into the pure, ominous, sheer terror that’s right in your face metal which we badly need.
The distorted guitars, snarling vocal arrangements, strings, keyboards, and pounding rhythm section that flows into the new album feels as if they’re channeling the work of Italian maestros Jacula’s 1972 debut Tardo Pede in Magian Versus with a death metallic approach, but tempted to honor and stay true to their orientated forms of metal, that’s waiting to reign terror with massive amounts of a bloodbath, unfolding.
Nine songs in, it can put you in this hypnotic trance with its rising form that stretches through a series of parallel stories Tribunal have put into their compositions. Whether it’s a score for a one-woman operatic play in the styles of Slapp Happy’s Dagmar Krause that Soren channels, as if she’s the evil queen from Snow White, knowing her tragic details have now come with dire consequences, but coming at the upper hand, waiting to put her stepdaughter down for good.
A powder keg ready to erupt for the apocalypse to happen, the tracks can take you into a brutal awakening that is surreal, twisted, and quite the challenge Tribunal have brought together with their second release. And we hope they’ll continue to surprise us with more adventures, waiting across the horizon.
