The cover art for the past two Dream Unending albums, both done by Benjamin Vierling (of Ys fame), depict shadowlike figures posed in reverence to ayahuascan landscapes. In Vierling’s work, the duo have found the perfect visual incarnation of the “dream-doom” tag they’ve borne ever since inviting funeral doom, death metal, and skyward-fixated prog to the same vision quest on 2021’s Tide Turns Eternal.
Certain Uncertainties, Dream Unending’s third album, continues the band’s incremental nudging of their heaviness-to-gentleness ratio towards the latter. Half of its songs don’t bear so much as a tangential connection to metal. The album’s patient wanderlust perfectly matches Vierling’s artwork, but when Dream Unending graft that meandering sound onto heavier songs, their bold alchemy occasionally feels inorganic.
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At its most restrained, Certain Uncertainties is sublime. The instrumental title track blends William Tyler-esque cosmic country with spiritual jazz—the latter courtesy of a mid-song trumpet solo by Vastum’s Leila Abdul-Rauf— for a compelling, egoless slice of psychedelia. “I Carry Your Burden” is another decidedly un-metal song featuring a metal lifer, with Magic Circle’s Brendan Radigan taking the mic to lead an open-hearted lamentation. The song achieves a synthesis of mournful humanism and woo-woo infinitum that has few rivals in the past 60 years of hippie philosophy.
Lead single “Strained Sincerity” opens with Certain Uncertainties’ most down-the-middle doom metal passage, and then spends most of its seven-minute runtime skillfully sprinkling unexpected seasonings on top. Derrick Vella’s lead guitar tones are in constant flux, pivoting from spacious reverb to spaghetti western twang to starry twinkling, all while he holds down the fort with chunky rhythm riffs. In its final third, the song forsakes carefully plotted structure and lets Vella and drummer and vocalist Justin DeTore jam out. While distorted chugs and patient doom drums churn away, Vella embarks on a noodle odyssey that feels completely untethered from its surroundings. With less than a minute left, Vella’s roiling base leaps up and his glistening ceiling dips down to unite in perfect harmony, but it only lasts for one painfully brief bar, a confusing tease of what could’ve been a blissful climax had it lasted just a little longer.
Vella’s marriage of burly down-tuning and freewheeling fretwork is a hallmark of his work with Dream Unending as well as death-prog greats Tomb Mold—grounded in heaviness while bounding off into headier altitudes. In Tomb Mold, he has a likeminded guitarist-in-arms in Payson Power, and onstage together, Vella and Power’s seamless switching between dizzying leads and crushing rhythm parts renders Tomb Mold’s ambitious pairing of styles less diametrically opposed as they may seem. In Dream Unending, Vella still keeps one foot in each world, but Certain Uncertainties erects more of a partition between his dueling multitracks. Every time he bursts out of a breakdown with a shimmering solo, the figure from Vierling’s album art starts to feel like Peter Pan’s shadow, defiantly flitting around the room to avoid being sewn back onto the feet of its guiding form.
2022’s Song of Salvation arrived just 357 days after the band’s debut, and it felt like a mastery of Vella and DeTore’s initial mission. Its epic-length bookends transposed the funereal aims of Bell Witch’s modern doom masterpiece Mirror Reaper to Floydian realms, while its gentler, more meditative midsection never completely renounced the artists’ metal roots. Certain Uncertainties mimics this structure, but its primary connective tissue is the bright, clean tone Vella uses on nearly every song. And whereas Song of Salvation’s drawn-out heavy songs were the primary focus, and the spacey experimentation in between functioned as bonus set-dressing, Certain Uncertainties is a stunning cowboy jazz album dotted with unwieldy cap-tips to its creators’ backgrounds in metal.
Over the past 20 years, many metal bands have proven that every strain of the genre, no matter how disgusting or abrasive, is uniquely situated to convey human emotion—often achieving this by embracing other styles: Deafheaven with shoegaze and post-rock; Panopticon with Appalachian folk. Almost without exception, though, the music’s impact is dampened when those bands attempt wholesale departures from metal. Certain Uncertainties is the first album of its kind that makes me crave a greater commitment to those extracurriculars. Vella and DeTore already achieved perfect synthesis of psychedelia and death-doom on Song of Salvation. Now, four years later, their deviations are the most deliberate and transcendent parts of their music.
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