The Bell Witch Clandestine Gate Review is an intriguing and mysterious topic that has fascinated people for centuries. It revolves around the folklore and legends surrounding the infamous Bell Witch haunting in Adams, Tennessee. The Bell Witch, also known as the Bell Witch Haunting, is said to have occurred in the early 19th century and involved the Bell family, particularly John Bell and his daughter Betsy Bell. According to the legends, the haunting began in 1817 when strange occurrences and paranormal activities started happening in and around the Bell family farmhouse. These events ranged from unexplained noises and objects moving on their own to physical attacks on family members. The haunting gained widespread attention and became a subject of fascination and speculation in the local community and beyond.

Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate

The Seattle doom duo embarks on an audacious mission—a beautiful and melancholy three-album cycle about eternal returns and daily toil.

Stepwise and slowly, Bell Witch have been forever approaching The Clandestine Gate, which is not only the Seattle duo’s new 83-minute, single-song album but also the first volume in a trilogy meant to loop eternally. A decade ago, the sans-guitar pair used bass and drums to make turgid but familiar doom, the dozen-minute songs of their debut, Longing, lurching toward glory. The follow-up, 2015’s Four Phantoms, felt epiphanic by comparison, its dual tandems of much longer and more radiant pieces seeming to reach skyward from hell, like Hieronymus Bosch enshrined in dual wheels of black wax.

The 2016 death of co-founding drummer Adrian Guerra only seemed to amplify the ambitions of bassist Dylan Desmond, as though existential urgency led him to slow down and stretch out even more. Mirror Reaper arced and ached for more than 80 uninterrupted minutes, the constant friction between its colossal parts tossing off radiant sparks. One of the longest metal tracks ever, it felt beautiful but conclusive. Where does a band with a single piece so long it’s split between two CDs go, aside from maybe the conservatory?

Bigger, retorts The Clandestine Gate. This sprawl opens with a mighty organ dirge, rippling like a massive flag swaying in a faint breeze. That is how Bell Witch’s proposed three-album cycle, Future’s Shadow, will also likely finish, the organ returning to reconnect the end to the beginning to form a cycle that actually has no ending or beginning. The Bhavacakra, the ouroboros, the eternal return: Desmond and drummer Jesse Shreibman lifted this pan-cultural motif from some of Friedrich Nietzsche’s most famous works. As much as The Clandestine Gate is the culmination of Bell Witch’s last decade, it also marks the surefooted start of their next several years, the first step in a truly audacious and titanic mission.

Ceaselessness permeates these howled, groaned, and hissed lyrics, full of “recurring dawn[s]” and “arrow[s] loosed at forever.” Dark fades into light, life into death, on and on, again and again. But the more immediate and enduring result of this approach to infinity is structural. A small clutch of riffs and rhythmic figures thread through The Clandestine Gate, disappearing only to reappear in slightly warped form. The record is more orderly motel than sprawling mansion, a few motifs repeated through the maze of levels and hallways.

The Clandestine Gate moves in a string of interconnected three-to-five-minute segments, the larger piece always shifting subtly just before tedium sets in. Early on, it’s the way Desmond’s high bass notes begin to trace a careful filigree over Shreibman’s steady organ; nearly 45 minutes later, it’s the way distant monastic chants finally coil into death-metal growls, severing the reverie and sending it back to solid ground. These eternal returns are less about infinite lives and more about pedestrian repetition, or surviving social structures that often ask the same of us at least five days per week. An earthbound interpretation of Nietzsche, The Clandestine Gate sets up life as the ultimate endurance exercise.

Still, in spite of The Clandestine Gate’s modular design, any record this long and involved can feel intimidating. And despite its grandeur and volume, its real power stems from its subtlety; check out, and you’ll put in an hour of listening with shallow rewards. Take The Clandestine Gate on a four-mile walk someplace quiet and even boring, where distractions are nil. It only gets richer.

Notice the way the rhythm expands and contracts, with Shreibman and Desmond pulling close and spreading apart, improvising with patience and precision that seem telekinetic. This dynamic pace mirrors breath itself, slowing and speeding as the task at hand changes. When Desmond’s riff tightens, Shreibman often springs beneath him, his heavy hits helping lift the notes with a sudden heave. This sense holds for the textures, too. Listen for the way Desmond’s distorted basslines echo the bright, clean leads he picks out with the high strings above them. Or spot Shreibman’s faint synthesizer harmonies rising in the distance during the quiet bits, like miserable fog framing another gray morning.

All this proffers itself as a readymade punchline, of course. An 83-minute doom album that is actually the first third of a four-hour opus seems a sort of galaxy-brained terminus, the ostensible slag of two stony dudes sitting for far too long in some smoke-clogged rehearsal room, tossing off absurd hypotheticals. Its minimalism becomes not just maximalism but also mannerism, so far up the form’s ass it may seem hard for outsiders to peer in. But Bell Witch are blessedly self-aware, adding one second of silence to The Clandestine Gate just to make it longer than Mirror Reaper, then sharing a laugh in interviews about the ridiculous choice. They get that this is a lot, that most folks don’t have the space for four hours of doom about, well, being doomed.

Bell Witch – Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate Review

Seattle, Washington’s depressive duo Bell Witch were already considered wunderkinds in the world of funeral doom when they dropped their now legendary one-track album Mirror Reaper in 2017, announcing not only their arrival as arguably the premier act in the genre, but also bringing the visual work of Mariusz Lewandowski to the metal world’s consciousness. Prior to this, the gold standard for funereal ambition matched with musical quality was Esoteric’s 100-minute double album The Maniacal Veil. While technically shorter at 83 minutes, Mirror Reaper expanded the scope of what doom could be, delivering a towering epic dedicated to the band’s original drummer Adrien Guerra, who passed away in 2016. Any reasonable human would look at this accomplishment and probably decide it was time to scale things back. Dylan Desmond and Jesse Shriebman are not reasonable. One wonders if they’re even human as they prepare to test the limits of attention span again with Future’s Shadow, a proposed tryptic of one-song records of which the 83-minute The Clandestine Gate is first.

Thematically and musically, Future’s Shadow and The Clandestine Gate tap into deeply primordial cycles of life, death, the passing of days into nights and back again, seasons, the rhythms of existence that began long before us and will continue long after. The band states that when complete, the end of the third installment will overlap with the beginning of the first so that in theory one could play it on loop forever. Before ideas of “progress,” before things like The Enlightenment or global religions, these cycles were a primary focus of art and worship. They’re deep in us. Elemental. It makes sense that Bell Witch would turn to these themes given how they’ve distilled their sound down to the deepest of fundamentals. Musically, The Clandestine Gate is doom metal concentrate. The baker’s chocolate of funeral. They wring emotion out of every sparsely placed, bass-plucked note and every lumbering, full-throated riff. There’s been an evolution in sound since Mirror Reaper in the heavy use of synths and organ, a vestige of their most recent collaboration with Aerial Ruin.

It’s probably unfair to hold “The Clandestine Gate” up too closely to “Mirror Reaper,” but given the size and shape of both songs, it’s inevitable. While there was a raggedness to “Mirror Reaper,” a slight edge that leant urgency to the titanic sadness and melancholy, “The Clandestine Gate” is, by contrast, the smoothest Bell Witch have ever sounded. This is partly due to the soft hum of synths rounding edges and underpinning transitions, but it’s also in the writing. When they go for the big funeral riffs, they’re of the classic variety. Familiar. No unexpected note progressions, just big, doleful waves that always end on a down note while somehow remaining emotionally buoyant. This is also the spookiest Bell Witch have ever sounded, especially in two stretches of plucked bass lines beginning just before the 25-minute mark of the composition and at around seven minutes before the song ends. The first stretch is the most spine-tingling. For the first quarter of “The Clandestine Gate,” the mood is solemn but regal, with organ swells and clean, choral vocals complimented by hefty riffs. The turn at 24:06 is downright sinister by contrast, with a deep, earthy bass encroaching the way rot and decay does in an abandoned house. This is not the kind of bass tone Bell Witch are known for, but that tone, the ghostly, comforting tone, like the memory of past warmth, is finally employed at the 76:40 mark, each note reverberating in empty air, unaccompanied, ushering the stillness of the end.

For an unbroken 83 minutes of music, “The Clandestine Gate” does a fine job of holding one’s attention with movements that feed rather than kill momentum, but there are spots that outstay their welcome. The first is in the introductory stretch, which could cut a few minutes off the primary riff before the haunted bass line takes over. The second lies at the dead center of the composition, which becomes a bit listless with synth faffing and a riff that leans too generic for too long. This makes for a rather squishy middle of what is otherwise a tightly composed whole. Fortunately, the final half hour is a showstopper, delivering waves of mountainous riffs and melancholic melodies that stand with the band’s finest material. 1

Knowing that this is an incomplete work makes for a difficult critique. I expect I’ll be reviewing not only the two remaining tracks of Future’s Shadow as they release based only on what can be heard at the time, but also delivering a verdict after absorbing the work as a whole. As has always been the case, if you’re willing to submit to Bell Witch’s vision of time-suspending, immersive doom, The Clandestine Gate is richly rewarding, but I can’t declare it an unqualified success without hearing the rest.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: n/a | Format Reviewed: Stream
Label: Profound Lore
Websites: bellwitch.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/BellWitchDoom
Releases Worldwide: April 21st, 2023

1. Which I consider to be “Bails (Of Flesh),” “Suffocation: A Drowning” and “Mirror Reaper.” ↩

Review: Bell Witch ‘Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate’

The cataclysmic rendering of Bell Witch‘s Mirror Reaper record still reverberates through the extreme music scene to this day, over five years since it first emerged from the nether realm like its album art cover suggests. Tectonic, apocalyptic, a record that has bewitched many since that day and it is always a pleasure and a curse to anticipate how a band will follow something so seminal. Well, your answer is Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate, Bell Witch‘s new record out now through Profound Lore.

One track. 1 hour, 23 minutes and 15 seconds long. Exactly the same as Mirror Reaper. If that doesn’t immediately give you an idea of the scope that this project is coming from, nothing will. Viewed as part one of the Future’s Shadow trilogy, The Clandestine Gate opens with slow, haunting organ notes that drift through empty space. It reminds me a lot of Asva’s What You Don’t Know is Frontier record, and as piano keys take over the melancholy at around four minutes, the morose gloom is starting to really set in.

Like all good funeral doom, The Clandestine Gate isn’t just an exercise in soul sucking heaviness (although when that starts to hit around the eight-and-a-half-minute mark, ooft) but also it is about tension, about atmosphere and about emotional weight too. The ghostly choral vocals come in after eleven minutes, an eternity for most bands but a mere blink in Bell Witch‘s time.

Upbeat isn’t the word, up-tempo certainly isn’t but there is a real sense of space, of vast open vistas that aren’t quite as dark and miserable as we were led to believe. By twenty minutes you could imagine almost this being an ambient piece, but with drums and guitar of course. It is huuuuge, but begins to close in on itself from here, trembling quiet notes shudder in the encroaching darkness and fade away into almost nothing. Sinister vocals weave within a single, creeping melody.

A more gloomy and funereal mood takes over, nothing cataclysmic yet, more like a trudge to the edge of the world. A stare over the end into the void, pausing to contemplate the abyssal growls emanating below you. The organ and choral vocals return as well, like a redemption light as everything starts to crumble. A conscious effort by the band to showcase more of their individual instruments and vocals perhaps? Certainly, it seems that way to me. The final, dirging destruction of death/doom tectonics, punctuated by organ once more, is the pièce de résistance of a work that is ritually spellbinding and invigorating.

I read in the promotional material that Future’s Shadow Part 1 was inspired by the minimalist films of Andrei Tarkovsky as well as the concepts of eternal return, where time never ends, and death is not the end of life but the beginning of a new infinite cycle. You can see exactly how, in the planetary, cosmic expanses of Bell Witch‘s soundscaping abilities; if this is the first part of a triptych that is destined to loop back upon itself like a titanic ouroboros of doom, then it foreshadows a truly time rending masterpiece. We are witnesses to the funeral doom’s rapture.

Bell witch clandestine gate review

01. The Clandestine Gate

First comes dawn. The triumph of light over darkness.

I reached my peak in funeral doom fanaticism in my late teens, at which point I left the genre alone and focused only on some favorite bands. For many years I kept seeing Bell Witch as “this very exciting new band that kept it true and minimal”. And while my opinion of them is well summed up in that sentence alone, they are not new anymore. It has been over a decade since their first demo and I’m living in denial. I guess that feeling of confusion and nostalgia is an appropriate mood for a journey like this one.

The road is long. The road is hard. So I have plenty of time to pick up the pieces. And the pieces I pick up from the floor are the pieces of my very soul. I go back in time. I remember the first time I saw Bell Witch at Roadburn Festival 2015. Adrian Guerra was still very much with us. Not long after that concert tragedy struck. Some time later, the perfect epitaph in the form of Mirror Reaper arose like a wounded yet defiant beast. I had the opportunity to witness it being performed live in its entirety as well, a moment I will not soon forget. To release something else akin to that masterpiece is nothing short of a herculean task. Perhaps that’s why the following work was a collaboration. Stygian Bough: Volume I (a collaboration with the Erik Moggridge-led Aerial Ruin) was perhaps an ideal bridge to ease the listener’s way into Bell Witch’s next proper album.

In any case, I can’t say I was prepared. My first interaction with this album was one I can never replicate. Because Bell Witch performed the album in its entirety for the first time, on the very day it was officially released, at Roadburn Festival 2023. But now I’m home alone. Just trying to pick up the pieces.

That’s how the first part of Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate feels to me. It’s a journey to recover. A journey to rebuild. If Mirror Reaper feels monumentally depressing because it illustrates a tragedy, then Future's Shadow feels monumentally depressing because it illustrates the arduous road forward. Instead of succumbing to crushing despair and agonizing impotence at the hands of fate, Bell Witch’s newest album questions and wanders into new territories. It tries new things and fuses them with memories of the past.

This album relies heavily on synths. From the grand cathedral-size opening to the last dying notes, the omnipotent sound of an organ provides the main foundation of this album. The crushing riffs, imposing drumming, harrowing growls, and angelic clean vocals are all present. But this time around they float and drone around the synths in a way they haven’t done before. Speaking of drone, it does feel like this album is more closely tied to drone and ambient than the previous albums. It even feels slower as if that were even possible at this point. As much as I enjoyed the beautiful and soothing nature of Stygian Bough: Volume I, what my heart really yearned for was to hear Bell Witch just being themselves. In that sense, this is an ideal follow-up to Mirror Reaper. Its introspective nature is to die for and the clever way the organ has been implemented and organically mixed with the crushing doom shows just the kind of exquisite songwriting we’ve come to expect from this duo.

I can’t help but obsess over the fact that this is part one of something, just like with Stygian Bough. On Bell Witch’s bandcamp page, Dylan Desmond reveals that Future’s Shadow will be a triptych of long albums. Dawn, noon, and sundown, with the third part looping around to the first one as to achieve a day cycle. This also confirms my thoughts regarding the album’s artwork, which heavily references Hieronymus Bosch, one of the true masters when it comes to triptychs. The solemn, dark, yet nonthreatening aura of Future's Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate does reflect the darkness that leads to light, just the way it happens at dawn. Yet this album already feels like a complete work so I can’t even begin to imagine what Bell Witch is planning next. One thing is for sure, though: we now have not two but at least three more albums to look forward to (if we count the next part of Stygian Bough). It is fascinating that Dylan Desmond and Jesse Shreibman are able to create massive works of art within the funeral doom metal spectrum and still keep it varied and intriguing despite their minimalist style.

Noon will come soon. What delights will the day offer us?

The haunting gained widespread attention and became a subject of fascination and speculation in the local community and beyond. The Bell Witch Clandestine Gate Review refers to the research and investigation conducted by numerous individuals and paranormal enthusiasts to uncover the true nature of the haunting. Over the years, various theories and explanations have been put forward to explain the events that transpired during the Bell Witch haunting.

Some suggest that the haunting was a form of psychic phenomena or poltergeist activity, where the energy and emotions of the Bell family members, particularly Betsy, manifested in violent and chaotic ways. Others believe that the haunting was a demonic presence or a vengeful spirit seeking retribution for a perceived wrong committed by John Bell. There are also those who argue that the entire haunting was a hoax orchestrated by the Bell family themselves for personal gain or attention. The Bell Witch Clandestine Gate Review delves into these different theories and attempts to provide insight into the true nature of the haunting. Investigators analyze historical documents, testimonies from witnesses, and paranormal evidence to piece together the events that occurred during that fateful period in Adams, Tennessee. Despite centuries of investigation and speculation, the true nature of the Bell Witch haunting remains a mystery. The Bell Witch Clandestine Gate Review continues to captivate and intrigue people with its tales of paranormal activity and unexplained occurrences. Whether one believes in the supernatural or not, the legend of the Bell Witch remains an enduring part of American folklore and a subject of fascination and debate..

Reviews for "The Bell Witch Clandestine Gate: Unearthing the Truth"

1. John - 1 star - I was really disappointed with "Bell witch clandestine gate". The plot was extremely confusing and hard to follow, and I found myself lost most of the time. The characters were also poorly developed, making it difficult to connect with any of them. Overall, I just didn't enjoy this book at all.

2. Sarah - 2 stars - I had high hopes for "Bell witch clandestine gate", but unfortunately, it didn't live up to my expectations. The writing style felt disjointed and inconsistent, making it hard to stay engaged in the story. Additionally, the pacing was off, with some parts dragging on for too long while others were rushed. I struggled to find any redeeming qualities in this book.

3. Mark - 1 star - "Bell witch clandestine gate" was a complete waste of my time. The story lacked depth and originality, feeling like a poor imitation of other supernatural thrillers. The dialogue was cringe-worthy and the characters were one-dimensional. I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for a captivating read.

Bells, Witches, and Secrets: The Intrigue of the Clandestine Gate