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.

No score yet, be the first to add.

At its most restrained, Certain Uncertainties is sublime.…