This is the second album from this Portuguese trio, whose style falls into the category of post-doom-death-sludge. The band has been in existence for 12 years.
Sound alert … that’s what the beginning suggests. A persistently dark beat and insistent rhythm brings black clouds to proceedings. The growled vocals add sinister edginess to something that is already chasmic. Post-doom-death-sludge is indeed what it is. This is “Web of Questions”. It is expansive and atmospheric. A break occurs. We hear breathing. “Web of Questions” descends into a near-apocalyptic doomy soundscape by way of a prolonged ending – too prolonged in my view. The deep and penetrating sound returns with “Unborn Pride”. “The weight of the world is falling over you” growls the vocalist. Weighty this most certainly is. The guitar rhythm is melodic, not unlike Disbelief in its insistent nature. “Steel” takes us further into the sludgy, post-metal, repetitive Cult of Luna style. I found this album extremely grim, but I guess that was the idea. Towards the end of “Steel” it builds up but whilst there’s a scariness about the indistinct voices, this was hardly tearing roofs off. “The Right Way” takes off in a different direction, its pungent weightiness dragging us along and sounding like old style stoner doom.
On we progress with the by now familiar relentless rhythm. This is “Unconsciousness”. The lyrics provide de facto no cheer so there’s consistency there and typically are addressed either in the first person either to someone else (“you”) or reflection, viz: “I feel the blood boiling and fading together with the memories, echoes of a life I never lived, raising the heat consumed by fear”. This ray of joy comes from “Starving the Weak”. There follows a haunting dirge of suffering, marked by bleakly expressive guitar work, pained vocals and persistent drums. The song opens up but like all of this album there seems to be a conscious attempt to repress excesses of emotion. If the lyrics of “Starving the Weak” were depressive, try this from “This Corpse”: “Today I woke up with hope, I left the pain to bleed alone, but as soon as I step on the floor, comes the flood, flood of thoughts and rage, why the fuck did you come?, I told you to stay away”. Observing that “This Corpse” is almost 15 minutes long, I braced myself for the relentless misery. The rhythm is constant and decidedly post-metal in style as it plods along with the growled vocals uttering agonised words of gloom and despair. At the heart of this track is the increasing dark power, but I rather liked the wind machine effect and the cosmic space section with which the album closes …. except that it doesn’t as we’re subjected after a few minutes of silence to one of those secret tracks, which could have just been an extension of the first part without the need for silence. I thought that secret tracks had died a death, but obviously not. The last section amounts to a gloomy vocal line accompanying a desultory heavy beat, rising in growly power and heaviness for the final minute but not as far as I could see enhancing anything that had gone before and just unbalancing the structure of “This Corpse” further.
I’m not sure where catharsis came into this, unless the band felt better for having figuratively sent us to the bottom of the ocean with a stone tied round our ankle. There’s no escaping the depressive heaviness of this, which I suppose is a quality. Maybe a devotee of this style will take a more charitable view, and to be fair I did see creative variation in some of the delivery of this, but there’s no escaping the fact I did find “Catharsis” stifling and hard going.
(5/10 Andrew Doherty)
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