Certain Uncertainties finds grace inside Dream Unending’s doom

By Daniel Okafor

Dream Unending’s third album, Certain Uncertainties, puts roughly half its songs outside metal’s direct orbit. The softening is incremental, not a clean break. Dream Unending keep their central identity while changing the ratio between heaviness and gentleness. The record’s patient wanderlust suits Vierling’s art, though heavier passages can expose the joins. The published assessment offers no numerical score and asks readers to be first to add one.

What do Benjamin Vierling’s covers establish?

Benjamin Vierling, the artist associated with Ys, created the cover art for Dream Unending’s previous two albums. Both images show shadowlike figures posed in reverence before ayahuascan landscapes. Together, they give the band’s “dream-doom” tag a visual form, pairing gravity with reverie in the same frame. Since 2021’s Tide Turns Eternal, Dream Unending have searched for that balance, bringing funeral doom, death metal and skyward-fixated prog into one shared vision quest. That visual idea also anticipates the album’s patient wanderlust, which often sits comfortably beside Vierling’s stark imagery. Certain Uncertainties extends that balance by reducing the band’s heaviness-to-gentleness ratio in small, deliberate steps. The cover art does not advertise a rupture. It suggests an unfolding.

Where does the record leave metal?

Half of the songs lack even a tangential connection to metal, according to the review. At its most restrained, Certain Uncertainties is sublime, the assessment’s plain verdict. The instrumental title track blends William Tyler-esque cosmic country with spiritual jazz, producing a compelling, egoless slice of psychedelia without seeking any conventional center. Leila Abdul-Rauf of Vastum supplies the mid-song trumpet solo. The source describes the result as psychedelia with little ego attached, which is both the album’s method and its appeal.

“I Carry Your Burden” moves even further from metal. Brendan Radigan of Magic Circle, identified as a metal lifer, takes the vocal for an open-hearted lamentation. The performance joins mournful humanism to “woo-woo infinitum,” a phrase the review uses with understandable affection. The source says the result has few rivals in the past 60 years of hippie philosophy. That is a large claim for one song. Radigan’s lamentation gives it some credit.

Does seven minutes of “Strained Sincerity” pay off?

“Strained Sincerity,” the lead single, opens with the record’s most down-the-middle doom-metal passage. It then spends most of its seven-minute runtime sprinkling unexpected seasonings over that foundation. Derrick Vella’s lead guitar pivots among spacious reverb, spaghetti western twang and starry twinkling, as chunky rhythm riffs hold down the fort beneath him throughout. His tones keep changing without losing the track’s center.

In the final third, Vella and drummer and vocalist Justin DeTore abandon carefully plotted structure and jam. Distorted chugs and patient doom drums churn below Vella’s “noodle odyssey,” which feels completely untethered from its surroundings. With less than a minute left, his roiling base rises and his glistening ceiling dips. The two registers meet in harmony for “one painfully brief bar,” a confusing tease of the blissful climax that might have arrived. That single bar contains the song’s promise and withholds its payoff. More minutes might have turned the jam into a destination. As recorded, it remains unresolved.

What should Dream Unending do next?

The record’s achievement lies in its restraint, but its seams remain visible when the meandering sound meets heavier songs. That graft can feel inorganic, an observation the review makes without ceremony. The album still offers doom’s mass, spiritual jazz’s lift and psychedelia’s patience in the same frame. That combination gives Dream Unending a distinct route out of metal without making metal disappear. The challenge now is as much about construction as concept: make the gentler passages feel inevitable and the heavy ones equally settled rather than juxtaposed. Certain Uncertainties is most persuasive when it waits and least convincing when it grafts. Dream Unending’s next record should preserve that patience without leaving the joins visible.