So you have decided to try Epic Doom Metal. Congratulations. Know that this is an important step on your path to a broader appreciation of music in its myriad forms. Your open mind and adventurous spirit will be assets in time to come. As a subgenre of a subgenre of an underground genre, it is understandable if you have not yet encountered Epic Doom Metal. Were we not delving into it right now, it seems entirely possible you never would. And what a shame that would be indeed.

Perhaps we should begin at the beginning, in the moody eyes of a young man named Ozzy Osbourne. These are the early 1970s, a time when young Osbourne could not yet imagine the mild success he would one day achieve in reality television. At this stage, our Osbourne, alongside guitarist Tony Iommi, played in a band named Black Sabbath. In its previous iterations, Black Sabbath had been firmly based in blues, but in the early 1970s, Iommi’s guitar playing grew heavier and the lyrics that Osbourne sang became more sombre and pessimistic. In the decade that followed, this new style of music would come to be known as Doom Metal.

Alas, I feel you slipping away, dear reader. Perhaps you share no love for slower harmonic tempos; perhaps you care not for the thicker guitar riffs, nor for the lyrical themes of despair and despondence. Fear not, dear reader, for what began with Osbourne, Iommi and Black Sabbath, took its own form. It travelled the lands, shaped by the cultures of those who played it. In some corners of the world, Doom Metal took on harsher forms, and bitter vocals bristled with guttural rasp. But in other lands, the clean vocals characteristic of the early days of Doom, were maintained. And one of these fledgling forms took shape as Epic Doom.

Vast Oceans Lachrymose

Ah, I see you have noticed the album art for Vast Oceans Lachrymose (2009) by While Heaven Wept, from Virginia, USA. The artwork is Christ Stilleth the Tempest (oil on paper and mounted on card), completed in 1852, towards the end of the life of English Romantic artist John Martin. A single vessel tossed by the violent hand of the ocean while lightning illuminates the hopeful visage of a city in the distance. Were Vast Oceans Lachrymose to have no track titles at all, Martin’s artwork alone would suffice as a visual summary of the album.

But we were speaking of Epic Doom, were we not? Epic Doom introduced classical characteristics to the traditional Doom model. It brought operatic and choral vocals, grander lyrics often drawn from mythology, and more complex orchestration. In their take on the genre, While Heaven Wept infuses the dense sound and cavernous drums of Doom, with other more progressive and melodic influences. Their work is an exercise in light and shade – balancing hefty riffs with delicate passages and melancholic lyrics with hopeful verse.

Vast Oceans Lachrymose is not so much a collection of individual pieces of music, as it is a single work that has been divided purely for listener convenience. To listen to the whole is to travel through the tumult of the ocean and to arrive at the shore, where the wash of the waves is audible in the closing strains of an instrumental epilogue. A single epic landscape: from the harrowing wake to the light that breaks yonder.

But what are mere words when you have Vessel by While Heaven Wept?

If you want to support the band, their music is available on Bandcamp.

Doom will never be popular, never be trendy, and will never be profitable for 99% of the bands … the label is indeed quite fitting.
Tom Philips While Heaven Wept

Since its early days in cheap pulp paperback, good science fiction has always sought to use fantastic worlds to explore the nature of humanity. This does not always translate onto screen, where the broad appeal of spectacle and set piece seems to trump all else. But every now and then, a film like Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival appears, as ambitious as it is thought-provoking, and reminds us of science fiction's potential.

Based on the Nebula award winning short story, ‘Story of your life’ by Ted Chiang, Arrival is about Earth’s first contact with aliens, who arrive in a dozen black, monolithic spacecraft dispersed around the planet. More specifically, Arrival is about Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams), a linguist at one of the landing locations, working alongside expert physicist, Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), and under military supervision. Their task is to establish a means of communicating with the newly arrived visitors, in order to determine their purpose and intent. To reveal more would be to deprive you of the experience, because Villeneuve’s film delights in setting and subverting expectations. Unlike many modern science fiction films, which sustain themselves through action, spectacle and banter, Arrival is about the joy of discovery. Each inference, each hypothesis and each discovery made by Louise and her colleagues, is a piece of the puzzle being assembled before the audience.

Naturally the international community is also struggling with the presence of twelve potential extraterrestrial threats and the tension for the audience parallels the escalating geopolitical tension in the film. And underneath the threat of global conflict and the struggle to communicate with another species, is the relationship between Louise and her daughter. Chronicled in an introductory sequence and in remembrances interspersed throughout the film, this relationship underpins the entire narrative. Villeneuve’s Arrival succeeds where even the visually stunning Interstellar by Christopher Nolan fails, because the personal narrative of Louise Banks and her daughter is not merely a means of generating empathy or motivation within a larger story – it very much is the story.

At its heart Arrival is an exploration of the nature of communication and perception. It is a film that manages to paint both a broad landscape of humanity, and a heartbreakingly intimate portrait of a single human, with an understated though assured performance by Amy Adams. Despite its clear ambition and a healthy respect for its audience, there are moments when Arrival missteps and loses momentum. This is particularly evident in the film’s extended concluding sequences, which, having provided all the necessary puzzle pieces, may have been better served by relegating the final few revelations to its audience. Allowing them the opportunity to discuss, to wonder and to question. In staying slightly too long, and wrapping things too neatly, Arrival falters at the finish line.

Then again, to err, is tragically and gloriously human.

• The Prolix Post gets closer to meeting its self-determined schedule.
• The Prolix Post inches closer to triple-digit readership and the type of runaway success we all envisaged.
• Major companies continue to have problems with their outgoing email servers, delaying the inevitable sponsorship contracts for The Prolix Post.
• I live in hope.
• Life goes on.

You're welcome,

Nikhil
Postponed Postmaster General