Foresight is 20/20

I hate surprises. Don't be daft asking why, everyone but the terminally spontaneous knows they're hideous blots upon the paper, the ruinous mirror to cherished overthought, the afterimage of people themselves Jake says ewww, or perhaps fate's too successful cloning of such rough beasts. Rules & exceptions, rules & exceptions except when a surprise rules, a royally gnarly proof. Rumor & hearsay, a new platter cometh from those neo/medieval/folk/kitchen sinkers, Unto Ashes. 'tis true, as rumor & hearsay go, Burials Foretold lying in my purple fingers, & surprise, one that doesn't direct me to Plath my Yorick: maestromind Michael Laird is rejoined by Natalia Lincoln (after a one-album absence) & Ericah Hagle, i.e. a nice slice of the temporal lobe trust responsible for the majority of the band's initial triptych, i.e. I'm doin' the Snoopy dance.

Such musicking for the terminally moody spades the first dirt with the guitar & viola da gamba title track, one of those short, intriguing stabs (viz. Interpol's Interlude, Witchcraft's Merlin's Daughter, Sabbath's Embryo, Kyuss' Capsized) you wish the spiders would spin further but are secretly ashamed to be glad they plucked because, like the best horror, the unseen/heard always trumps showing too much. Voices don't enter till they shadow the percussive bagpipe of Pilzentanz, lyrics lifted from the authority-whipping twelfth century Apocalypse of Golias. Then, boom, boom, shroom, Laird's hazy emulsion running over French horn (She Binds Away the Night); his no bullshit willow wisping 'oh it's dark' on glinting teeth & eyes, as the earthy soprano-less chorale enters 'with gloom/Night Is Coming Soon,' reminding why I swooned over this sound in the first place; some are just in our spectral wheelhouse.

A tradition, laying notes below third-party verse: Fire + Ice, a reinterpretation of Empty Into White's wrathful Flayed by Frost, itself originally inspired by Robert's masterpiece in miniature, the circle squared; Bierce's satirical [ed. note: Redundancy Department of Redundancy] Worm's-Meat gnaws on a gentle undulation; & a hurdy-gurdy lilt for illustrator Cicely Mary Barker's Spring Magic.

Piper's Song leads Bart Farar's cover, a single wary, weary eye lodged in washed-out burnt orange flesh, its companion long rubbed out as the world's wont to do, towards the old shuttered rooms of Witches' Rune, Sonnet 87, Estuans Interius. See Hermes T: "I beget the light, but the darkness too is of my nature."

Showing they could make a buck or three as one of the world's finest cover bands -- see their original-what-original stab at the Cure's The Drowning Man, & the hauntingly [ed. note: this overused word applies with perfection, trust me] deconstructed (Don't Fear) The Reaper. Now, stripped of Eddie's crunch, Mike & Alex's manic pulse, & Dave's ah yeahs, Van Halen's Runnin' With the Devil, here Running; youthful defiance is now experienced resignation.

Kept short n' bittersweet, only one track pointing above four minutes, polaroids of a broken tongue only able to spill ichor accompanied. I'd relate -- but would still keep quiet, I'm not that strain of fool -- if it wasn't for this keyless, bird-killing warble; I don't even sing in my car. Blood For My Lady's solo-in-spirit coursing & the molded sole-on-industrial-glass that scratched hither & tiptoe through Grave Blessings & Songs for a Widow have vanished, the latter more than the former, exorcised by the vocal entanglement of old (Young Men Leave for Battles Unknown), the British folk of Too Late to Begin, Lincoln's piano from a silent film denouement (Rubine).

A loamy ouroboros of raw-head & bloody bones salted with a decay-fueled rebirth, one reading of Burials Foretold is a reflection on band breaks up/gets back together (yeah, a stretch, given the myriad folks who've picked, hit, crooned), another is that mythic macrocosm, a third, fourth, tenth is the listener's personal. In any, either, all case(s), while there's nothing immediately otherworldly clutching as Widow's The Snow Leopard, & Empty Into White remains (Moon Oppose Moon? Saturn Return? Magic 8-ball says ask again later) their finest, I get the sense that the fifteen songs about love, sex, death [ed. note: every song ever written, once you peel the rank, absurd layers of the human onion, is about either love, sex, &/or death, except that one, you know which] on Burials Foretold relish the chance to go chord to chord.