As the Flower Withers…

With all the recent talk of former My Dying Bride members getting together as a new band (Towards the Sinister) to play older MDB material, I thought I’d revisit the first album.  As the Flower Withers is an album that has always lived somewhat in the shadow of what came next. Turn Loose the Swans is rightly regarded as one of the defining records of doom metal, and perhaps the album where MDB became unmistakably themselves. But its stature has sometimes had the unfortunate effect of making the 1992 debut feel like a preliminary sketch. It isn’t. As the Flower Withers is an amazing album in its own right, and in some respects possesses an atmosphere that the band would never quite return to.

There was, of course, already a glimpse of this world on the earlier Towards the Sinister demo. It captures My Dying Bride in a considerably more primitive state, with their death metal origins much closer to the surface, but the essential atmosphere is already there. You can hear the beginnings of that peculiarly English sense of melancholy and antiquity that would soon separate them from the mass of early 1990s death metal bands. Towards the Sinister is rough and embryonic, but viewed from the perspective of As the Flower Withers it becomes fascinating. The debut didn’t suddenly invent MDB’s identity. It took something already lurking within those early recordings and gave it space and weight and possibly more importantly, beauty.
The journey from Towards the Sinister through As the Flower Withers and into Turn Loose the Swans happened remarkably quickly, but the debut remains the point where all those disparate elements first truly coalesced.

Where Turn Loose the Swans feels romantic, tragic and increasingly sophisticated, As the Flower Withers feels older. It feels to me like the time immediately after the Romans left Britain, when the magnificence was beginning to decay and the Dark Ages were about to begin. Maybe something almost medieval about it, not in the obvious modern sense of adding lutes and calling it medieval, but in its dark emotional character. It feels like ruined stone churches, cold earth, religious dread and a world where death is a normal part of the landscape. The album has a strange archaic quality, as though its doom belongs less to Victorian gothic romanticism and more to some much earlier conception of grief, faith and mortality.

That feeling is there from the beginning. The guitars are enormous, but they aren’t merely heavy. The riffs move with the now characteristic slow, ceremonial weight, occasionally breaking into passages that remind you just how much early death metal still existed within MDB at this point. Aaron Stainthorpe’s vocals are correspondingly brutal, much further removed from the theatrical spoken and clean passages that would become such an important part of the band’s identity. There is still poetry here, though. In fact, the contrast between the ugliness of the vocals and the strangely ornate language and atmosphere is one of the album’s great strengths. The lyrics on the first EP, Symphonaire Infernus et Spera Empyrium captivated me, and separated Aaron from the mass of other lyricists of the time.

Martin Powell’s violin is already absolutely fundamental to the music, but on As the Flower Withers it feels particularly ancient and mournful. Rather than simply providing a beautiful counterpoint to the guitars, it can sound like something being played at a funeral centuries ago. It doesn’t feel grafted onto metal music as an attempt to make it more sophisticated either. It belongs there, another voice within the music, sometimes lamenting and sometimes almost uncomfortable in its sadness.

Rick Miah’s drumming deserves a particular mention as well, because his playing here is possibly my favourite work of his. It’s enormously powerful, but what really stands out is how creative it is. Rather than just sitting underneath those huge riffs and keeping time, he constantly gives them shape and movement, with fills and rhythmic shifts that make these long, slow pieces feel alive and unpredictable. There is physicality to his playing here, particularly when the band moves between the crawling doom passages and the more aggressive death metal bits. He knows when to drive everything forward and, just as importantly, when to leave space. For an album so often remembered for its guitars, violin and atmosphere, Miah’s drumming is a huge part of why As the Flower Withers has such extraordinary weight and momentum.

After the intro piece Silent Dance, Sear Me opens the album with extraordinary confidence, unfolding slowly rather than rushing to establish itself, and immediately setting out that mixture of crushing guitar, death metal weight and mournful violin that defines so much of the record. There is something almost processional about it, as though the music is moving through some ancient ceremony rather than simply progressing through a song. As the first thing you hear on the album, it establishes the world of As the Flower Withers remarkably well. This isn’t just death metal played slowly, something else is happening.

The Forever People provides an interesting contrast, showing the more aggressive side of the band and reminding us that this was still a group emerging directly from the early 1990s death metal underground. The faster passages are important because they give the enormous slower sections around them even greater weight. As the Flower Withers is certainly a doom record, but the death metal underneath it is never very far away.

The Bitterness and the Bereavement pushes that feeling further. The combination of violin, crawling guitar and Stainthorpe’s voice creates something remarkably evocative. It isn’t polished sadness, its grief rendered as ritual. The music seems less interested in arriving anywhere than in allowing you to remain inside that atmosphere, and that willingness to dwell on an idea would become one of the bands defining characteristics.
This song has another connection to the earliest days of MDB through the obscure rehearsal flexi 7″, released by the band’s friend Woz White. It’s an artifact that feels completely appropriate to this period of the band: primitive, scarce and about as far removed from a slick commercial release as it is possible to get. My own copy came through a trade with Woz, for which I swapped a rare Emperor CD EP. He ended up numbering my copy Promo #1, which has made it a particularly treasured piece of MDB history for me, although I think it was because he had found a stash of them un-numbered under the bed. There is something cool about hearing The Bitterness and the Bereavement in that embryonic rehearsal form, before the atmosphere and enormous funereal weight of the album version had been fully realised. It provides a direct little window into the band at the point when this music was still being formed in a rehearsal room, and somehow the roughness only adds to that ancient, slightly otherworldly character I associate so strongly with As the Flower Withers. It comes from the era when live and rehearsal bootlegs were traded feverishly, and this was a step up on a dubbed tape.

The Return of the Beautiful, is perhaps one of the clearest indications of where MDB were heading. At over twelve minutes it is allowed to breathe and wander, moving between brutality, melancholy and passages of remarkable beauty without any sense that those elements are contradictory. Even the title seems to encapsulate the strange duality at the heart of early MDB: ugliness and beauty, desire and death, brutality and romance existing together.
There are moments during The Return of the Beautiful where you can almost see Turn Loose the Swans beginning to emerge, but it still belongs completely to the strange, raw world of the debut. It has none of the feeling of a band consciously trying to write an epic. It simply takes as long as it needs. Along with Sear Me, it contains almost everything that makes As the Flower Withers so compelling.

Erotic Literature, has always been a particular favourite of mine. Originally included as a bonus track on the CD edition of As the Flower Withers, rather than forming part of the core album, it nevertheless feels completely at home here. It is a wonderfully filthy, heavy piece of early My Dying Bride, still carrying plenty of the death metal brutality of their beginnings while already possessing that unmistakable sense of morbid romanticism.

It’s also one of my favourite songs to play on the guitar. There’s something very satisfying about those riffs under the fingers: heavy without being needlessly complicated, and with that peculiar sense of movement that makes early MDB guitar parts so enjoyable to actually play rather than simply listen to. Even the title captures something that would become central to the band, that strange meeting point between sexuality, beauty, religion, suffering and death. Despite its original status as a CD bonus track, after living with the album for so long it is difficult not to think of Erotic Literature as part of As the Flower Withers itself.

The production helps enormously. By later standards it is raw, but that rawness suits the music. The guitars have a coarse physicality, the drums feel relatively unadorned and the whole recording possesses a kind of damp, subterranean character. Making As the Flower Withers sound as sumptuous as some of the band’s later albums would probably destroy much of what makes it special. It needs those rough edges, it needs to sound as though it has been dragged out of somewhere cold and dark.

The visual side of the album is just as important to its identity. Dave McKean’s artwork is superb and feels inseparable from the atmosphere of the record. McKean’s work has that wonderful ability to sit somewhere between the organic, the decayed and the vaguely surreal without ever becoming straightforward fantasy artwork. Here it feels almost like some unearthed medieval relic, something religious perhaps, but corrupted by age and decay.
It suits the musical aesthetic of As the Flower Withers perfectly. Like the music, it suggests something ancient without resorting to obvious medieval imagery, and there is a physical, almost tactile quality to it that is appropriate for an album filled with earth, death, faith and mourning. It’s a cover where it is difficult to imagine the music existing behind anything else.
Some years back, a limited photographic art print of the cover art was released in an edition of just 25 copies, each signed by Aaron Stainthorpe and Andrew Craighan. I was lucky enough to get number 1 of 25. Since I have been a fan of Mckean’s work since before I knew of MDB, I had to get it.
It now hangs in pride of place above my stereo system, which seems exactly where it should be. I spend an unreasonable amount of time sitting in front of that system listening to music, and having this small piece of MDB history above it means considerably more to me than simply owning something rare. There are plenty of supposedly collectable things associated with music, but this is one I genuinely treasure, up there with my Nicko McBrain drumstick.

There’s also a youthful extremity to As the Flower Withers that I love. Turn Loose the Swans would take these ingredients and arrange them into something more ambitious and emotionally nuanced. The clean vocals, piano, more sophisticated dynamics and extraordinary sense of romantic despair made that album a genuine landmark. It is easy to hear why it became the record against which almost everything else My Dying Bride recorded would be measured.
As the Flower Withers offers something different.
It’s heavier, earthier and perhaps more mysterious. Its sadness doesn’t yet feel entirely personal. Instead, it feels almost historical, as if the music is describing some collective memory of plague, religion, burial and loss. There is mud on its boots. The beauty is there, but it exists among decay rather than above it.
The medieval character is perhaps the thing I keep returning to. It is difficult to define because it doesn’t come from any one instrument or deliberate historical reference. It is simply embedded in the atmosphere. The violin certainly contributes, as do Stainthorpe’s lyrics and delivery, but so does the pacing of the music itself. There is something fatalistic about it. Death isn’t presented as a dramatic event. It feels inevitable, familiar and ever present.
Perhaps thats why I continue to find the album so compelling. Turn Loose the Swans may be the more complete artistic statement, but As the Flower Withers has an atmosphere entirely of its own. You can hear the guys discovering what they could become, but you can also hear something they would subsequently leave behind as their music became more refined. That slightly primitive, medieval feeling belongs particularly to this moment in the band’s history.

More than thirty years later, it still sounds wonderfully strange: death metal slowed almost to the point of collapse, pierced by mournful violin and wrapped in an atmosphere that seems to belong to another century.

Turn Loose the Swans may be the masterpiece everyone remembers. As the Flower Withers deserves to be remembered as far more than simply the album that came before it. The creativity and musicianship on display heralded great things to come, and that proved to be the case.

Rather timely is the new An Anthology of Sombre Reflections box set, which brings together and celebrates this earlier period of My Dying Bride and has just shipped to me as I write this. Given how much affection I have for this particular era of the band, from the primitive beginnings through As the Flower Withers and beyond, it feels like a set almost designed for me. I’m very much looking forward to getting my hands on it, disappearing into those early recordings again and, inevitably, finding another reason to write about them