Bell Witch - Symphonies for Ghosts

Terror and emotion: the introspective music of Bell Witch

The American band Bell Witch, from Seattle, have coined a poetics of melancholy that fuses the mournful with the moving, exploiting the colossal proportions of their slow-burning compositions.

In weaving their hypnotic collection of symphonies for ghosts, they have risen above the monotony of so much extreme doom-metal, keeping alive the emotional and evocative power of their music, matched by the colossal physicality of the sound, which wisely alternates rarefaction with dramatic explosions.

In this, they have established themselves as the true heirs of the English band Esoteric, masters of the so-called funeral-doom-metal style inaugurated by Thergothon, who had already expanded the language of this style to reconnect it to its more psychic and imaginative dimension.

Bell Witch have pushed this trajectory to the extreme, scoring the movements of the soul and highlighting the seemingly contradictory closeness between pain, beauty and tenderness.

Stylistically, thanks to post-metal and death-metal contaminations, as well as a dynamic reminiscent of the skeletal sludge of the Melvins and the curious choice to forgo electric guitar, Bell Witch's work has pushed doom-metal towards an evolution that distances it from its more rock-oriented, physical nature, while still bringing to fruition that exploration of the menacing loom of adverse fate that has been at the genre's core since its founding, whether traced back to the early experiments of Black Sabbath or to later bands such as Pentagram, St. Vitus or Candlemass.

With Bell Witch's work, doom-metal enters a deeply introspective and lyrical dimension, in which the funeral liturgy becomes an immersion into the abyss, inviting comparisons more with the sonic cathedrals of Sunn O))) than with the genre's classics of the Eighties or Nineties.

Longing and ghosts: the early years (2010–2015)

The duo was formed in 2010 by drummer and vocalist Adrian Guerra and bassist and vocalist Dylan Desmond.

They took their name from the legend of the Bell Witch, one of the most famous tales in American folklore, centered on the misfortunes of the Bell family, farmers in Tennessee: between 1817 and 1821, they allegedly suffered a series of attacks from a mysterious, shape-shifting entity, whose presence was heralded by inexplicable events straight out of gothic tradition — creaking noises, the sound of chains, bedsheets pulled off sleeping family members, strange and sudden physical ailments, and even assaults in the form of hair-pulling, scratching, slapping, pinching and stabbing.

Word of the witch spread by mouth even to neighboring towns, and its impact on North American culture was so powerful that it ran through the entire 19th and 20th centuries, accumulating new sightings, inexplicable occurrences and interpretations along the way.

Since 1999, with the horror mockumentary "The Blair Witch Project", the film industry too has taken its turn at interpreting this chilling tale, with all its typical dramatic license and spectacle.

In music, it was the Danish Mercyful Fate who released the most famous tribute to the legend, the track "The Bell Witch" (1993), before Desmond and Guerra themselves chose the name Bell Witch.

The band's career began with the release of a demo, Bell Witch (2011), its cover showing a mysterious, faceless female figure; it's built around two extended tracks, one eleven and a half minutes long, the other eighteen and a half.

The first, "I Wait", is paradigmatic of their style: the slow pace, the bass lines enriching the funeral march with vibrant melodies, the arrangement thinning out and thickening again, the alternation between the two vocalists and their more aggressive or more chant-like deliveries. The final climax marks an early peak of hypnotic suggestion.

The second, "Mayknow", is even more lyrical, intoned by the voice at the two-minute mark with sacred composure, before fading to a whisper and then rebuilding into an abyssal roar, a feral doom-metal that nonetheless regains balance thanks to the bass melodies, a poetic voice amid the abyssal swirl. At the ten-minute mark the slowdown turns into stasis, even recalling the atrocities of Khanate, before the bass's poetic voice returns, soothing and melancholic, to slowly relaunch the sacred chant heard at the opening, now reinforced by a more imposing arrangement and made more urgent by the drums' more dynamic rhythms.

The dark omens hinted at by the demo, already shot through with a suffocating melancholy, were enough to convince Profound Lore (the label behind other metal innovators such as Agalloch, Alcest, Locrian, Pallbearer, Portal, Pyramids and many others) to release an album, Longing, which reached audiences in 2012.

The cover features a depiction of the Bell family's farmhouse and an invisible, otherworldly presence — in all likelihood the witch of the legend.

The four main compositions all run past the 12-minute mark, with the shorter "Beneath The Mask" (carried over from the demo and incorporating dialogue from Roger Corman's 1964 film "The Masque of the Red Death") and the closing track serving as brief framing pieces.

The whole album is marked by a tragic tone, softened by a boundless melancholy, so poignant that it reveals its own painful beauty. The two members' voices alternate between spectral touches and liturgical, even Gregorian and sacred solutions, while the bass dominates the arrangement and the drums explode with dramatic intensity.

The album opens with the boundless "Bails (Of Flesh)", a desperate bass lament that then fades into a stentorian, solemn funeral doom, from which it resurfaces even more anguished and expressive at the four-minute mark. The entrance of the growl is a moment of pure terror, an icy wind sweeping over the listener as the dirge continues, reaching a new peak in the terrifying slowdown of the sixth minute. Lit up in a pensive sway, a nocturnal slo-core, the track finds in its vocals, melody and their subsequent harmonization a sweet surrender that carries through to the fifteenth minute, when the abyss yawns open again for a brutal doom, driven by the growl all the way to the close, after nearly 21 minutes.

The 13 minutes of "Rows (Of Endless Waves)" open with the most explosive and suffocating doom-metal, quickly clearing into a tiptoeing elegy that drops to a whisper before clouding over again, moving toward the deepest night to recite an apocalyptic poem. "Longing (The River Of Ash)" halts the distorted bass to heighten the desolation, letting the melody wander through the pauses before a slowed-down liturgical chant describes the dreamlike, unsettling vision of a river of ash.

Among the extended tracks we also find "I Wait", already heard on the demo.

Erik Moggridge, known as Aerial Ruin, provides additional vocals on "Rows (of Endless Waves)": it's the first step in a collaboration destined to continue.

Having caught the attention of an audience far wider than the one usually drawn to funeral-doom-metal, Bell Witch return with the even more imposing Four Phantoms (2015), split into four extended tracks: two exceed twenty minutes, two hover around ten.

They are, moreover, paired off, suggesting an intertwined two-suite structure. "Suffocation, A Burial: I – Awoken (Breathing Teeth)" and "Suffocation, A Drowning: II – Somniloquy (The Distance Of Forever)", 45 minutes in all, are a symphony for ghosts all on their own. Opened by another great moment of bass lyricism, it's a breathtaking whirlpool of distortion and growls that carries on for the first nine minutes, until the lone bass traces a nocturnal melody that then shatters at the twelfth minute: a colossal bass riff and devastating drumming prop up a desperate scream.

After briefly thinning out the arrangement to make room for a melodic solo of solemn slowness, eventually joined by the growl, the first part closes with a melodic voice towering over a sea of feedback, elbowing its way through the drums' catastrophic thuds.

The second part opens with a chant that seems to have emerged from the sands of time, ancestral in feel. After a few minutes of deafening doom-metal, the voice intones a melancholy hymn for the damned, boundlessly desperate ("Drowning in skin, again and again"), then turns ragefully sorrowful and restless, with the tempo doubling into a slow-motion death-metal before resignation reigns again, slowly unspooling toward eternity ("The Distance Of Forever"). That this is a time of the psyche, surreal and boundless, is made clear by the return of the initial ancestral chant for the closing.

After such a sonic cathedral, the suite made up of "Judgement, In Fire: I – Garden (Of Blooming Ash)" and "Judgement, In Air: II – Felled (In Howling Wind)", at 21 minutes, feels somewhat diminished. On the whole, it leans into more distinctly horror-tinged or gothic tones, with the arrangement conjuring ectoplasmic miasmas and supernatural hisses bordering on hallucination. The melodic weight of the distorted bass remains essential, cradling the listener in melancholy while the voice describes an endless torment ("Fall, forever and again") that ends up infecting the whole arrangement, finally collapsing into a drone.

Four Phantoms is an experience that stuns with its volume while winning over the heart with its melodies, its grief-stricken lyrics, its flayed screams and bestial roars.

It is not mere aesthetics of horror, but rather an exploration at the end of the night, wandering through the dark recesses of a nightmarish mind, through the folds of the deepest melancholy.

Expanding on the already ambitious Longing, which inaugurated the band's style while losing its way in a few less fully realized passages, this second album pushes the ambition further, toward extended, complex compositions unfolding at a slower pace.

The death of Adrian Guerra and Mirror Reaper (2016 – 2017)

The relationship between Desmond and Guerra grew more strained over the course of making Four Phantoms, largely due to the latter's struggles with alcohol abuse. Jesse Shreibman, a friend of Desmond's already involved in live mixing and as road manager, steps in to take his place. In 2016 Adrian Guerra dies of a heart attack at just 36 years old.

The duo thus decides to halt work on the new album in order to process the grievous loss. In 2017, having chosen to carry on the Bell Witch project, they complete their third album, Mirror Reaper.

Released at the end of October and born out of processing the drummer's loss, it consists of a single composition of a staggering 83 minutes, which also incorporates some of Guerra's vocal recordings, originally left off the previous album.

Introduced by a stunning cover by Polish artist Mariusz Lewandowski, a painting titled "Essence Of Freedom", clearly inspired by the unsettling work of Zdzisław Beksiński, Mirror Reaper uses bass and drums as the main building blocks of the arrangement, with four voices trading off: Jesse Shreibman delivers a dramatic growl, Desmond sings clean, Erik Moggridge appears in the finale for a soothing close, and, in perhaps the most moving moment of the whole boundless composition, Adrian Guerra's voice returns from beyond through the aforementioned archival recordings. A Hammond organ, played by Shreibman, is added in a few passages.

From a compositional standpoint, Mirror Reaper is the fulfillment of the band's aesthetic, a striking eulogy that explores the border between life and death, between the sweetest light and boundless dark. Desmond's bass is more of a protagonist than ever, right from the hushed, poetic opening minutes. Melancholy turns to drama in the long funeral march that follows, in which the towering wall of distortion is lit by the faint glow of a vocal that, emerging as an abyssal growl, rises into a sacred invocation, a liturgy echoing through impenetrable night, unfolding at a glacial pace, placid and inexorable.

Once again, rather than a poetics of the atrocity of pain, Bell Witch's music glows with an enchanting, melancholic beauty, a nuance that gives the dirge depth and lifts it away from cheap horror, toward an exploration bordering on the lyrical, if not outright philosophical.

The first part effectively ends after 17 minutes, labeled on the double vinyl as "As"; the second, "Above", runs 21 minutes. Picking back up from the opening melody, even more fragile on its second appearance, the music slows and fades until it becomes pure suggestion in a tender, aching prayer whispered by Desmond's bass alone, the lone voice of a mutilated duo. This faint soliloquy becomes a pensive, circular, hypnotic rumination with the evocative power of fireflies in the dead of night: the outlines of what it suggests lie more in the listener's mind than in objective reality; the ghosts taking shape in the shadows are manifestations of one's own inner life. The sacred voices return, as does the growl and the drums, marking a new and painful descent into the abyss, completed around the twenty-ninth minute. Once again, though, the spasm of grief is followed by a melancholic climax, which lightens the arrangement through electric bass melodies that cover the entire coda of "Above", letting a few timid glimmers of light seep through the darkness.

The third section, marked on the double vinyl as "So", begins right after, although the sequencing is entirely different on the double CD edition. Either way, what follows is a more melodic and solemn section, in which the growl comes across more as a lament than a roar, joined also by liturgical chant, building to a climax that concludes at the 48-minute mark.

With the bass soliloquy back, now a lifeless trickle that is more weeping than prayer, Mirror Reaper prepares to strike its deepest chords, the voice arriving on tiptoe, distant and unreal like a ghost's, brimming with a moving melancholy. A song from beyond the grave, outside of time and poised on the border between two worlds, an auditory hallucination that metaphorically reunites Desmond and Guerra across the boundary of death: the mirror of the title becomes a portal, a membrane that can be crossed precisely at the point of deepest darkness, at the furthest edge of perception.

"Below", which closes the second LP, regains strength after the first few minutes, raising a majestic, exceedingly slow funeral hymn and finally returning to the bass theme before a most fragile coda: a final elegy whose last sung seconds are lit by a melodic fragment that is the first miraculous ray of dawn, after the boundless night.

The critical success of Mirror Reaper is a unique case in the history of extreme doom metal, with major outlets naming it among the albums of the year: from Rolling Stone to Metal Hammer, from PopMatters to The Quietus. Review aggregator Metacritic confirms the widespread enthusiasm, with an excellent metascore of 85/100.

Popular music is certainly no stranger to albums that deal, more or less centrally, with profound grief, often in the singer-songwriter form of records like "A Crow Looked At Me" (also from 2017), "Skeleton Tree" (2016) or "Carrie & Lowell" (2015), to name just a few contemporary examples alongside Mirror Reaper. The difference is that the latter comes from a niche and an aesthetic unfamiliar to most listeners.

It's hard to imagine anyone looking to push this style forward after 2017 being able to ignore what Mirror Reaper achieved; it's destined to remain a benchmark for funeral doom metal, and its influence can be traced in many later albums, for instance MSW's "Obliviosus" and Atramentus's "Stygian".

Life after death: Stygian Bough and Future's Shadow (from 2018 onward)

Erik Moggridge aka Aerial Ruin takes on a far more prominent role on the follow-up to Mirror Reaper, Stygian Bough Volume I (2020), where he gets to practice his spectral dark-folk within the framework of Bell Witch's funeral doom metal. With Moggridge's guitar added to the mix, the formula comes across as less desolate and more easily traced back to the Candlemass lineage, starting with the opening, 19-minute "The Bastard Wind". "Heaven Torn Low", however, takes a full 12 minutes to move past its initial dark-folk before settling into doom metal that isn't especially distinctive for the band.

"The Unbodied Air", running over 19 minutes, opens with doom metal before sinking into the bodiless atmospherics already heard in the second half of Mirror Reaper, closing with a solemn, tragic march.

Inspired by James Frazer's "The Golden Bough", Stygian Bough Volume I seems unable to recapture the previous album's wrenching force, and ends up diluting its own emotional charge, retreading or flattening some of those same ideas. It is, understandably, an album that captures a band still searching for a new balance, for a life after death.

Only the continuation of the project, arriving in 2025, will make clear whether this collaboration proves significant to the band's career: we'll discuss that in due time. Also in 2020, they began work on the new album, the true follow-up to their 2017 masterpiece. Two years of work, begun during lockdown, proved essential in helping Bell Witch rediscover their liturgical, esoteric relationship with time. The daunting task facing the new Future's Shadow project, spread across three parts for a total of four hours of music, is to depict the entire cycle of day and night — that is, light and dark, life and death — in a majestic gothic symphony in which the duo's traditional instruments are joined by broader passages of organ and orchestral arrangements. In the band's vision, the finished project will be experienced as a loop containing the poetry and drama of time unfolding.

The first part, Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate (2023), is a single 83-minute track. The progression is more dynamic, with extensive organ sections and touches of synth, long stretches at a brisker pace, death bells, and long, lyrical flights of bass, both poetic and feral.

Inspired by Nietzsche's eternal return and the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, this incarnation of Bell Witch seem ready to push past the boundaries of the format and expand their music into a more developed philosophical and cinematic dimension. While reserving judgment on a triptych of albums that's still taking shape, The Clandestine Gate is already able to creatively, coherently and evocatively broaden the band's language with a boundless composition that doesn't just repeat Mirror Reaper, but rather hints at possibilities for pushing past new frontiers.

Stygian Bough Volume II (2025) returns to the collaboration with Aerial Ruin, this time carried out with a greater blending of the two souls involved: the funeral-doom side and the dark-folk side. Compositionally and production-wise, the fusion is decidedly more organic, in a play of contrasts between the moving and the colossal that renews the band's expressive core. 

Just four extended compositions, moving at an extremely slow, melancholy pace, cradling the listener between majestic guitar strikes and sweet melodic vocals, swaying within the dark allure of the border between life and death.

"Waves Became The Sky" (12 min.) is imposing and poignant, an extremely slow funeral threnody in which two voices intertwine: the vocals and the lead electric guitar. "King Of The Wood" (15 min.) is more tormented, mournful in its first few minutes, then it fades to an evocative, ectoplasmic whisper that surges back into another colossal threnody. "From Dominion" (11 min.) opens with spectral, understated acoustic guitar, then explodes into another cyclopean doom passage, broken up by a prayer sustained by a liturgical organ.

The closing "The Told And The Leadend" (19 min.) is the ideal culmination, the most articulated composition, split between gloomy, gothic riffs, heartfelt melodies, a folk interlude, galactic solos and unsettling cacophonous visions of feedback and thudding drums, right up to the final explosion.

Nothing particularly new for the band, but the progress compared to the first chapter of the collaboration with Aerial Ruin is plain to see: this time the partnership becomes a project of deep, enchanting, poignant cross-pollination. By their standards, it's also a fairly accessible album, one that engages with traditional doom and metal in general far more than Bell Witch usually do.

In light of two projects that are still evolving, and could take many years to complete, what matters is that their music has already left a mark on those who've heard it, the way only the most evocative folk tales can: the kind that strike the imagination and stay in memory over time, like the mysterious, centuries-old story of the Bell witch.

The images placed within the body of the text are paintings by Mariusz Lewandowski, who died in July 2022. Following the cover art for "Mirror Reaper", he had become one of the most sought-after artists among metal bands

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google