PENACE - "THE ROAD REVISITED"

If you consider this name to mean Michael Smail, Mary Bielich, Matt Tuite, Dave Roman and Brian Balich known for their wonderful releases such as “Parallel Corners” 1994, “Proving Ground” 1999, “Alpha&Omega” 2001 and “Spiritualnatural” 2003, you will be surprised. This release returns us to 10 years back in time, when on the ruins of Pittsburgh’s Dream Death new doom indie-adept Penance was born. There’s an interesting story behind this record – the band recorded their debut album twice, and the second version “The Road Less Travelled” was released in far 1992. Why they decided to release the first master (never heard before) recorded by Brian Lawrence on vocals and guitar, Terry Weston on lead guitar, Rich Freund on bass and permanent Mike Smail on drums and the producer board on psycheDOOMelic now, 13 years later is a question that will never be answered, but anyway it’s a good idea.
The song order is the same, but here we have a little sweet surprise: there is one more track “Eulogy”, which was not included in “The Road Less Travelled”. I think you agree it’ll be uniquely interesting for fans to open, to explore, to find out the well known themes again. It has some thrill to listen to the songs how they were sounding in the process of becoming. Well, about the music – it’s awesome! Crying, rainy, deadly monotonous steps of destiny with gloomy, long, lingering riffs kind of “Black Sabbath has nowhere to hurry”. And the real pearl here is that you can hear the not grown together yet, still sleeping germs, the developing embryos, which will sprout later into the masterpieces. That’s why they’ve called “Revisited”.
(Julie)