The Dead Sea - The Ceremony of Marrying a Mummy (2020)

Country: Jordan
Style: Melodic Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 15 Jul 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

Seeking out rock and metal from unexpected countries has yielded many rewards for me, but one key one last year was a one man melodic doom/death metal project from Jordan that goes by the name of the Dead Sea. That man is a busy musician named Azmo Lozmodial and I adored his debut as the Dead Sea, Hypernatremia. I've been eagerly awaiting a second album, but somehow failed to notice that he released one in July called The Ceremony of Marrying a Mummy.

It's another concept album, this time exploring the bizarre case of Carl Tanzler, a radiology technician in Key West who was obsessed by one of his patients, Elena Milagro de Hoyos. Believing her to be the true love shown to him in childhood visions by an ancestor, he pursued her as well as treated her, but, as far as we know, she never reciprocated his love. After she died of tuberculosis in 1933, whilst under his care, he stole her body from its mausoleum and lived with it for seven years, keeping it in his bed. He was caught in 1940 dancing with it in front of an open window.

While the case against him was dropped because of a statute of limitations, he was generally seen as a hopeless and eccentric romantic, but the details are creepy indeed. The corpse rotted, so he preserved it by attaching its bones together with piano wire, replacing its decomposing skin with silk cloth he'd soaked in wax and plaster of paris and filling its chest cavity with rags to maintain its form. Of course, he also used perfume, disinfectant and preserving agents to limit decomposition and mask the smell.

It's a wild story, ripe material indeed for a concept album, albeit a bit more straightforward in nature than the more vague concept that spawned Hypernatremia.

And, like Hypernatremia, this album is an immersive experience that I let wash over me for a couple of listens before being able to focus in on everything it does. The melancholy just drips off the opening track from its quiet outset and it continues to drip when the crunch kicks in. Lozmodial sings cleanly, narrates and then sings harshly. There are a lot of dynamics in play on a Dead Sea album, and this one also features guest female vocals, though not yet. For now, it's Lozmodial and the stylistic alternation works really well to represent the romantic vs. creepy angle, as well as to dramatise it.

This album didn't grab me as strongly as the prior one, but it's good stuff, even if the lyrics are often clumsy. To be fair, the rhyming couplets on A Ring for Decomposed Finger are cheesy but appropriate, given the context. "Your fingers look darker now / but to keep them safe I forever vow" is awkward in the extreme but it's the exactly sort of thing a German scientist in the Victorian era might write to an unrequited love he believed was sent to him by destiny.

A few other songs follow in the same vein, leaving us half melting hearts at how lost in love Tanzler is and half rolling eyes at how awful his poetry is on the subject. "Like a rose, you withered and passed away / Despite all the wishes, the dreams and the prays" is worthy of William McGonagall. There are a few ponderings on sanity here, but an abundance of musing on what might have been and how death can't stop that. While some of this is a theatrical take on concept, mostly it's just a consistent theme.

And much of the success here, beyond the general atmospheric texture, ties to the story. The more we learn about Tanzler, the more it all seems to work. For instance, Tanzler was an organist so the use of an organ on the opener, Dancing with Armless Carcass, which recounts the point at which Tanzler was caught, is especially creepy/romantic. I don't think it follows reality particularly strictly, as Tanzler is not known to have actually attempted to marry his beloved corpse, but it does fit his dreamy musing on a future unaffected by death.

Interestingly, it's all male vocals for the first half of the album, the first five tracks detailing Tanzler preparing the corpse for marriage and getting to the point of "With this ring I thee wed". And, that done, the second half kicks off with a female voice for the first time, the patient soprano of New York opera singer Julia Radosz echoing in space. The feel is very different here, with the presence of violin and serious amounts of echo on Orchestral Burial.

Most of my favourite tracks are on the second half too. I love the combination of organ, violin and a gothic vocal approach on My Withered Admirer and the aching slowness and crushing weight of it all. It's not quite funeral doom pace but it gets close, certainly as close as this album gets. I love the riffs on The Scent of Decayed Face and especially Saline Whispers too. This latter also features guest vocals from Greek singer Katherine Hofmann in duet with Lozmodial, albeit not many of them.

I liked this album a lot. I think it plays with its theme better than Hypernatremia, but doesn't end up as memorable musically. Still, it's recommended and I'll try to do a much better job of looking out for the next Dead Sea album.

The Dead Sea - Hypernatremia (2019)

Country: Jordan
Style: Melodic Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 15 Nov 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Metal Archives | YouTube

Sometimes albums just leap out to be reviewed. I've been a fan of doom/death since the very beginning and I'm always keen to see where new bands take it. This band is one man from Amman, Jordan called Azmo Lozmodial, who wrote the music and the lyrics, played all the instruments (except for some additional guitarwork from guest Alex Papadopoulos), sang in both harsh and clean voice and even mixed and mastered the album as well. I had to hear this.

And I'm very happy that I did! This is interesting stuff indeed, even if I'm not entirely sure where the title comes in. Hypernatremia is a notably high concentration of sodium in the blood, which leads to a whole slew of medical problems. Here, on what is apparently a concept album, it refers to the lady in the story tasting the salt in every word the protagonist utters, perhaps as a curse after he's murdered her, reflected in reality through his leaving her underwater and perhaps joining her in death.

There is a track called Mental Salinity, but it's an instrumental so doesn't add anything to the story. The Dead Sea, of course, is full of salt, so much so that we can float in it without having to inflate anything to help. It is a logical choice for a musician from Jordan calling himself The Dead Sea to use that famous local attraction as the venue for this poetic action. And it is gloriously poetic.

The music stands out from moment one, but the lyrics, which Lozmodial sings in English, are absolutely worth your attention. On the first track proper, Mummified Beauty, he introduces us to both the beginning and end of a weird relationship. It begins with melancholy promise: "You fell from the moon and landed inside a cave inside my chest." It ends with bleak darkness: "Embrace the shores now eternally." The title track covers the gap, showing an inner ugliness manifesting itself physically and setting up a violent response.

Or at least, that's what I got here. This is wildly impressionistic so that there are probably many readings. I couldn't be quite sure if this describes murder, murder/suicide or just an incredibly dark reading of a relationship gone bad. There's even a hint at a supernatural element. Is this lady human or a mermaid or siren? Maybe there are no people at all and this is about a sun and a sea, the former killing the latter with aching slowness. The Dead Sea has been dying for 65,000 years, getting saltier as it goes. Whatever it means, it's a beautiful and evocative take on a story that's isn't likely to be very beautiful at all.

The music works on its own merits, standing alone as a melancholy piece that feels gothic in its grandeur but fundamentally claustrophobic too, as if we might be slowly drowning along with whoever actually dies in this story. As such, it also works as a companion to the lyrics if we sit down to read them and let the imagery seep into our souls. Everything's filled with water and death, love and grief, regret and inevitability.

As everything plays so consistently, it's hard to call out individual tracks for special mention. They all feature slow but complex drum rhythms, jangly and melancholy guitars and melodies that flow so slowly that we often catch part of them and then build up a full impression. Mummified Beauty features a piano echo to a guitar melody that's lovely. Bells play an ominous but melodic part on Echoes from the Barren Seabed and others. My favourite moment comes in the early stages of the title track when everything stops a number of times only to build right back to full gear almost immediately.

The vocals shift between harsh, clean and spoken and all work. When they're harsh, they're dark and brooding but always intelligible; when clean, they carry a longing to them that's only enhanced by melody. This is strong use of the human voice as an instrument without ever losing understanding. That isn't as easy to achieve as you might expect.

Lozmodial seems to be a busy man. In addition to The Dead Sea, which may be a one-off project rather than something ongoing, he has a string of others in motion, often either one man efforts or collaborations with international musicians. The most traditional band he's been involved with thus far seems to be is Chalice of Doom, a melodic doom/death band to which he contributed lyrics, clean vocals and keyboards.

Just looking at his active efforts, he's half of Xathites and Now Everything Fades. The former is an Egyptian based depressive black metal duo, while the latter plays depressive black/doom; he provides all the music while Fernando Garcia handles the vocals. Tholomat is straight black metal, but the band is split between Norway, Hungary and Jordan. Cyclothymia appears to be another one man project. And that ignores Al Lat, DeathDiaries, Forgive Me and Lord Azmo. Al Lat sounds particularly interesting, as middle eastern folk meeting symphonic black metal. Clearly I need to explore.