Mistress of the Dead

Some Funeral Doom to snatch you from your daily death!
It’s time to dig up good and barely known Mistress Of The Dead!

Mistress of the Dead is a one-man band from Czech Republic founded by Vlad Cristea Vales who released a lot of demos and a few full-lenght since 2004.
Concerning the overall atmosphere, the system is based on quite long compositions that gradually evolve and where each instrument takes place in the scene, layer by layer, in order to slowly design the ambience.
Each release contains only few tracks but they are around 10 – 15 minutes.
The ensemble is rich in instruments, the keyboard plays a big part in Vlad’s compositions, responding to the weeping guitars, it makes them rise and breathe. The result is quite theatrical and that funeral doom takes an « ambient » coloration. With Mistress of the Dead, every decor is a painting, everything becomes poetic.
Like Thergothon or Skepticism, it’s funeral, so the vocals are low, harsh and growly. They make you feel the pain, every syllable transmits the disease like a rusty syringe directly to your blood.

Instru-mentally disturbed!

Here are my favourites. Those tracks start quite shyly and paint progressively a cold and dark funeral landscape.

You have to listen:

1. I Know Her Face From The Tombstone
2. Cryptic
3. Dying Candle and Forgotten Withered Rose
4. Henriette’s Message From The Other Shore

I was alone, alone and well…

I like to walk in cemeteries, those in Paris are beautiful and include many beautiful grief statues. I’ve already roamed in the Père Lachaise with Mistress of the Dead in my ears, and I could have stayed there for days.
Funeral doom metal, by its extreme slowness, has the ability to make you lose track of time.
I was there, looking at the tombstones, the statues were watching me, I lingered at the comings and goings of the crows and nothing else mattered… I was alone, alone and well.

† Corbal.