#funeral doom

[biggi-666]

Phantom Slaughter

[band: Worm]

[wolverineblues]

Worm - Foreverglade artwork by Brad Moore

[sorcerers-pledge]

Cavurn - Rehearsal (2017)

[evilsatisfaction]

[ambientgaze]

bell witch @ parish

austin, tx - 11/04/23

[mauvais--sang]

Derais - Of Angel's Seed and Devil's Harvest - 2017

[thehardgroove]

[onlyhurtforaminute]

DOOM: VS=WHITE COFFINS

[dustedmagazine]

Of Darkness — Missa Tridentina (Sentient Ruin Laboratories)

This reviewer generally has little time for funeral doom, a subgenre that requires a whole lot of time, given its intrinsic relation to glacially slow paces and patterns of development. Instead of the oft-intended existential terror, much of the music inspires tedium, a narcotized death march into slumberland, not nightmare. The fact that this funeral doom band has hung the insipid moniker Of Darkness out on its shingle does not help or augur well. But some of the musicians’ names improve the picture: Javier Félez Rodríguez, appearing here as “Bastard” (ok), provided scorching lead guitar on Teitanblood’s excellent The Baneful Choir (2019); CG Santos also performed on that record, and his noise/blackened drone project Emanation makes hugely effective, deeply unpleasant sounds. But does the alchemy among the players lead to music that makes your skin crawl, rather than inducing terminal lassitude?

The answer is yes, for the most part, but you’ll first need to penetrate a thicket of fairly stale semiotic gestures. The anti-Catholic iconography on Missa Tridentina’s album cover art and song titles is plentiful — and sure, the Church is an evil mess and has been for centuries. But all the Latinate verbiage and skeletal figures sporting ritual robes and relics of occult significance fail to scare up anything all that terrifying. Better to let the music speak for itself. That speaking does not commence with promise. “Adjutorium Nostrum in Nomine Domini” is an instrumental intro that goes for symphonic grandness, but it’s dull stuff.

The next 38 minutes or so are much more interesting, and a large measure of that is generated by the electronics that warp the massive sheets of droning guitar noise. That’s Santos at work. Of Darkness has been releasing records intermittently since 2004, but Missa Tridentina is the first to feature Santos. His addition is crucial, if not obtrusive. Check out the long, climactic track “Requiescant in Pace.” The warble and fade in the vocals, the expert use of reverb—those are production techniques, but the band’s greater attention to the textures of their massive sound likely has much to do with Santos’s addition. In the song’s sixth minute, he asserts himself with flashes of piano, bordering on atonal runs. It’s just the right touch of dissonance. The creepiness the record seeks starts curling your toes. When the thick riffs returns, Santos treats it with several layers of weirding noise. It’s the best song on the record.

This reviewer underscores his lack of interest in the subgenre, but he also notes that there’s an interesting set of synonymies between music devoted to slow, agonizing dramatizations of death and the earthball’s current condition. All the attention to Christianity on Missa Tridentia suggests a backward-looking sensibility, to metal’s traditions and to older ideological forms. Bands like Of Darkness might stir more urgent emotions if they turned their gaze toward the present, to the modalities of slow death the human race endures, right now, this very minute.

Jonathan Shaw

[biggi-666]

Phantom Slaughter

(band: Worm)

[darktripz]

BELL WITCH - Future’s Shadow Part 1: The Clandestine Gate

[smokeycemetery]

[evilsatisfaction]

[sludgewarden]

Mournful Congregation - Left Unspoken