The cover art for the past two Dream Unending albums, both done by Benjamin Vierling (of Ys fame), depict shadowlike figures posed in reverence to ayahuascan landscapes. In Vierling’s work, the duo have found the perfect visual incarnation of the “dream-doom” tag they’ve borne ever since inviting funeral doom, death metal, and skyward-fixated prog to the same vision quest on 2021’s Tide Turns Eternal.
Certain Uncertainties, Dream Unending’s third album, continues the band’s incremental nudging of their heaviness-to-gentleness ratio towards the latter. Half of its songs don’t bear so much as a tangential connection to metal. The album’s patient wanderlust perfectly matches Vierling’s artwork, but when Dream Unending graft that meandering sound onto heavier songs, their bold alchemy occasionally feels inorganic.
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At its most restrained, Certain Uncertainties is sublime. The instrumental title track blends William Tyler-esque cosmic country with spiritual jazz—the latter courtesy of a mid-song trumpet solo by Vastum’s Leila Abdul-Rauf— for a compelling, egoless slice of psychedelia. “I Carry Your Burden” is another decidedly un-metal song featuring a metal lifer, with Magic Circle’s Brendan Radigan taking the mic to lead an open-hearted lamentation. The song achieves a synthesis of mournful humanism and woo-woo infinitum that has few rivals in the past 60 years of hippie philosophy.
Lead single “Strained Sincerity” opens with Certain Uncertainties’ most down-the-middle doom metal passage, and then spends most of its seven-minute runtime skillfully sprinkling unexpected seasonings on top. Derrick Vella’s lead guitar tones are in constant flux, pivoting from spacious reverb to spaghetti western twang to starry twinkling, all while he holds down the fort with chunky rhythm riffs. In its final third, the song forsakes carefully plotted structure and lets Vella and drummer and vocalist Justin DeTore jam out. While distorted chugs and patient doom drums churn away, Vella embarks on a noodle odyssey that feels completely untethered from its surroundings. With less than a minute left, Vella’s roiling base leaps up and his glistening ceiling dips down to unite in perfect harmony, but it only lasts for one painfully brief bar, a confusing tease of what could’ve been a blissful climax had it lasted just a little longer.