WHILE HEAVEN WEPT is one of these bands that if luck brought them to your notice horizon they will complete absorb you for a long time. Their power beyond the great melodies that are able to create is that inside their songs you come across such intense and powerful feelings that steamroll the listener. They are one of these cases where art meets emotional catharsis which attacks the exposed yourself and revealing hidden ways or things that believed were once and for all forgotten.

All the above and we must say multiplied a few times is a poor description for the previous album "Of Empires Forlorn". Maybe I'm a little bit hyperbolical in my words but that was a release that shines for the 00 decade. These strong feelings and mental state that brings you is really indescribable, an album that can lead you to melancholic paroxysms. One of these underground diamonds and one of the favorite bands in the Doom Metal fields although terms like the previous are not so accurate especially with this new opus. It's been six years since that masterpiece and you can realize that the appetence for the new WHILE HEAVEN WEPT album was huge.

Unfortunately and more precisely in the beginning I was very disappointed with "Vast Oceans Lachrymose". First of all I was surprised with the change behind the microphone. From now on the singer is Rain Irving instead of the main man Tom Phillips. Here I must mention that Rain has, objective talking, better voice but in my taste he cannot be compared with what Tom made in the previous songs. Simply there is no comparison. Also the new tracks tend to a progressive horizon. This is not so bad, they had this element before no doubt and sometimes they are close to old and good FATES WARNING but they distil or better exhaust the soul essence inside and finally the songs become weaker despite their dynamics.

The truth is that after many listens right now I see "Vast Oceans Lachrymose" with a different point of view and surely is far away for being considered not only bad but even mediocre. A lot of guitar riffs are crystal power; the acoustic parts are great while refrains as these ones like "Vessel" are not composed easily. There is soul here. And if some of you will listen to them for first time then I guess you will been blow away. But because of the big value and weight that "Of Empires Forlorn" had our hopes were definitely higher than "Vast Oceans Lachrymose" and every time I listen to the first one the other very quickly disappears from my mind. Maybe this battle between them damnify in a wrong way the new one, I don't know, the only sure is that here we have a band that deserves 100 per cent your attention. And for once again the lyrics are fantastic and same goes to the cover.

To end this review it is worth checking the vinyl reissues that Iron Kodex and High Roller spread this February for all the full lengths of the band plus the cd reissues from Cruz Del Sur for both "Of Empires Forlorn" and "Sorrow Of The Angels". And it is a good time to take them, limited to 1000 copies if I'm not wrong, since the originals were out of print for many years.