Sporae Autem Yuggoth - ...However It Still Moves (2023)

Country: Chile
Style: Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 May 2023
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While Sporae Autem Yuggoth certainly play doom/death metal as advertised, that doesn't give an accurate impression of what they really do.

The doom at the heart of their sound is deep and slow, surely rooted in funeral doom and it's aided by the keyboards of Johanna Sánchez, which add a tantalising visual element to their sound, as if a song isn't just a song but a portal into a mediaeval castle, a torture dungeon or an ancient abbey. I know that most of what she does is texture, but that probably extends to sound effects, like an odd bell or scream or gust of wind. On rare moments when the band speeds up, which they do at some point in most songs, they sound fast but they're actually just catching up to the tempos that many doom/death bands use to begin with.

The death aspect is primarily in the vocals of Patricio Araya, who doesn't sound at all like his fellow Chilean namesake, Tom. Patricio's voice isn't so much a death growl, as a hoarse croak. It's an ache of a voice that adds more to the textures the keyboards are conjuring up, bringing age and history with it, as if he's been stuck in those castles, dungeons or abbeys for centuries. Finally he's got the chance to tell his stories, but he's been so long without a voice that he has to fight to get more out than the whisper at the heart of The Pendulum of Necropath, managing it across the album with a time-honoured rasp.

Sánchez is the new fish here, as everyone else has been in place since the band formed in 2019, and their only previous release was an EP back in 2020 called The Plague of the Aeons, which featured a slightly different line-up: no keyboards, but a second guitarist, Juan Drey, who left a year later. I'm intrigued as to what that sounds like, because the keyboards here often creep in through cracks an additional guitarist wouldn't leave so obviously in place. There are songs when Sánchez sees those keyboards as a sort of second guitar, as on the gloriously titled ten minute epic Colosus Larvae: The Crimson Coffin & The Scarlet Worm. There are points where she fills in like she's a mad organist in a different part of the building who delights in joining in, but surprisingly subtly.

I should add that this is a long album and the length may be its toughest challenge, as it reaches a breathe over an hour, ambitious for a debut album. That length works for me, because this isn't a typical set of songs, it's an immersion into a particular atmosphere and that lingers even after the music is done, so time ceases to have meaning. The fact that this feels ancient, gothic not in music genre so much as in literary genre, aids that because it feels like it's taken centuries to arrive with us. If a song could be dropped, maybe Disintegration would be a good candidate because it's faster and more traditionally built for the most part and so brings us out of that atmosphere a little.

On a more traditional album, it would be a highlight and it's a tasty and mature piece, built out of rollicking riffs rather than atmosphere. It also helps to underline how delicate Disguise the Odious Spirits is on its heels. This is the true epic of the album, running twelve and a half minutes, putting it a couple ahead of Apparition of Internal Odes, Colosus Larvae, Through Dominion to Interlude, a trio of songs that run around the ten minute mark. This is the one among them that truly takes its time to set the scene and ease slowly into a build. The others all tell stories, while the third has fun with the band's roots, hinting at the Funeral March in a less overt way than Candlemass.

And I do wonder which bands combined in their minds to distil this particular sound. It used to be a given that doom/death bands owed a serious debt to Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride, but that's not obvious here. I'm hearing a more continental flavour than a British one, finding inspiration in Celtic Frost, Winds of Sirius and, especially as the album builds, Candlemass. I'm sure there are an array of funeral doom bands in the mix too and likely classical composers too, thinking far beyond a Chopin nod to the way they write in such a visual fashion and play with space, especially during the elegant closing instrumental, The Night Ocean. I'll seek out some interviews to discover how they reached this sound.

I'll seek out some interviews to discover how they found this sound. I'll also play this a bit more in between reviewing other albums, because I think it's going to grow on me even more than it has.

Ahab - The Coral Tombs (2023)

Country: Germany
Style: Funeral Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Jan 2023
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I'm happy to see a new album from Ahab, because they've been away from the studio from quite a long time, their fourth album, The Boats of the Glen Carrig, released in 2015. However, this is very different from the Ahab I remember, in a number of directions. I remember them playing funeral doom, shifting between ambient atmospheric passages and crushingly slow doom metal. A friend added their debut album, The Call of the Wretched Sea to the playlist in his car, after I gave him a copy, and it had quite the impact on his passengers!

On the face of it, this is a clear continuation of what Ahab do, because The Coral Tombs is another concept album fashioned from literature that runs long but with few songs, the majority of them reaching the ten minute mark. Sure, this is actually their shortest album, by about thirty seconds, but shortest for Ahab still means an hour and six minutes. This time the source material is Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea by Jules Verne, which means we're not just out there on a broad ocean, we're underneath it. And, thinking of it as a complete chunk of music, it's clearly still doom.

However, the opening track, Prof. Arronax' Descent into the Vast Oceans, which was also released last year as the first single, takes its doom in a couple of very different directions to funeral doom. It starts out much faster than I'd have expected, Daniel Droste's cavernously deep vocals joined by Chris Noir of Ultha, who delivers a bleaker black metal shriek that I'm used to in Ahab. And then it calms down, all the way to an almost Floydian ambience. It's agreeably slow now, but the vocals at this point are entirely clean and rather resonant and they stay that way into the first recognisable funeral doom section almost four minutes in, only finding harshness a couple of minutes later as it all shifts into a guitar solo.

Now, none of that is inherently bad, merely unusual enough to be surprising. I rather like this new approach, which almost seems the textures of funeral doom as an element of progressive rock. I'm especially fond of that clean vocal, which at this pace feels all the more emotional, an outpouring of despair into a deep abyss, appropriate given the context, though I recall Prof. Arronax in a state of wonder as the Nautilus descended into the depths. Maybe I need to re-read the source novel. It serves as a pivotal book for the steampunk community, after all. I should keep it fresh.

Colossus of the Liquid Graves, the other single, is much closer to what I expect from Ahab, even if it wraps up in an almost unfathomable six and a half minutes. It's slow and heavy throughout, full of epochal power chords under a slow melody line. Droste effectively duets with himself, alternating between his usual deep and guttural harsh voice and that soaring clean voice so apparent on the opener. It's an excellent contrast, especially for this material, because it feels like the harsh voice is underwater, while the clean one soars above the waves waiting for the Nautilus to broach.

And so it goes. I'm not sure if I ever heard The Boats of the Glen Carrig, even though I'm a William Hope Hodgson fan, so I really should, but I believe I've heard everything before then, certainly the first couple of albums, and I don't remember this balance before. The Ahab in my memory are like the heavier sections here, albeit slower still, with some of the lighter sections there to serve as a contrast. However, I'm remembering a 10:1 balance rather than the 2:1 balance we get here. Long passages in many of these songs are neither doom nor metal and feel much more like an ambient take on prog rock.

Now, it still sounds good so I'm not complaining and it's arguably rather appropriate this time out because I vividly recall page after page of the Nautilus steadily moving along underwater while its new passengers marvel at the sea creatures they pass. Verne was clearly an effusive fan of fish, so whole sections of the book read like an exhaustive commentary by an author who has visited a big aquarium and is aching to tell us about all the colours. Many of those sections here unfold entirely instrumentally, so we don't have to put up with that commentary except in shades of sound, which I'm not unhappy about in the slightest.

For old school Ahab, A Coral Tomb may come closest in toto to what you're looking for. I'm tempted to call out the opener as my highlight, but I dug a lot of the ambient sections that remind of quiet instrumental Genesis, so I'm not going to turn my nose up at songs like Ægri Somnia either. This is likely to be a shock to many Ahab fans, but it's a really good album. Welcome back, folks!

Omination - NGR (2021)

Country: Tunisia
Style: Funeral Doom/Death Metal
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 5 Feb 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

Regular readers will know well that I live to discover things that I haven't heard before. That's why I'd easily call Nepal Death's debut my favourite album of the month, even if I've rated three others above it. This is the first to even stand up as a contender and that's because this is a one man funeral doom/death metal album from Tunisia on the aptly named label Hypnotic Dirge Records.

That one man is Fedor Kovalevsky, who doesn't sound like he's from Tunisia, unlike his bandmates in progressive death metal outfit Vielikan, Zied Kochbati and Nessim Toumi, both of whom seem to have at least some sort of connection to Omination even if they don't play on this, the project's third full length release. Wherever he hails from originally, he's based in Tunis and that makes this a Tunisian extreme metal release, one that's long, fascinating and uncompromising.

And I say funeral doom/death metal for the sake of listing a genre. This may not be what you imagine from that description, though it's certainly as fair as anything else. This may sound really weird but I ended up thinking of NGR as the dark side of early Enigma. No, this isn't built out of samples and I'm not suggesting that it's Gregorian monks shifted into a minor key. However, the instrumentation here is as much church organ, bells and choral chanting as it is guitars, bass and drums. The whole thing is about setting a mood and that mood is cultists in black robes performing unholy rites in the ruins of an unsanctified church.

It's also experimental enough that it's hard to sit this truly alongside bands like Ahab, who are heavy and achingly slow but traditional enough in their song structures that you could play them at 45rpm instead of 33rpm and get a different experience. This often appears to be as much a sound collage as a piece of music. There are points where our ears catch riffs and melodies and rhythms and all the other things that we critics call out so often for attention, but mostly this sounds like a train colliding with a packed church in slow motion and in such a way that the result sounds appealing.

I'd love to hear someone better versed in experimental music than I explain why this works. I can see a particularly canny combination of subgenres, bringing in walls of sound from black metal, the growls from death metal and the slow pace and atmospheres of doom metal, but there are other things here. This is music I could imagine reading about in The Wire as much as Terrorizer and I'm convinced that a number of the instruments here are found objects in a Einstürzende Neubauten sense, bringing some proto-industrial textures into play.

It also feels as if it falls into a genre that could simply be called loud music. I don't know the technical wonders that the production is utilising but I've stood in a tiny venue with a band performing louder than was appropriate for the space and my ears rebelled at the sheer volume. I felt the same here and I have a volume control that I can tweak however I like. That discomfort factor is built into the music and it's fascinating to me. I don't want to leave, but my ears are constantly struggling to understand what's happening in such a challenging environment. This is what intensity sounds like and I say that before we get to the industrial black metal section sixteen minutes into The New Golgotha Repvbliq.

The vocals help a picture like that because they're varied. Kovalevsky sings with both clean and harsh voices but he also shouts, not in a hardcore style but like he's fighting to be heard in a hurricane, and he also chants in ritual fashion. I presume it's all him, because he's credited for everything, but he's a cast of characters rather than a single performer. Given that some of this feels ritualistic, I wonder if it was written with visuals in mind. If I put the words "dark opera" together, I'd expect something in a gothic metal vein, which this totally isn't, but they seem to fit here.

The stage would need to be huge though, because the grandeur here is Wagnerian in scale. This needs an organ the size of a building and entire walls of choirs. The characters have to be giants, fallen gods moving achingly slowly, especially during the hypnotic ritual chanting sections in songs like Unto the Ages of Ages and Death(s), Love and Life. The sets and costume must be black and white because colour has been bled out of this album. And it must have an ethnic angle, even if African flavours don't show up until Post-Apocalypticism almost an hour in, because wherever this unfolds, it isn't here and that's going to stand wherever you're reading this from.

Did I mention that this album is long? When Post-Apocalypticism ends, eight songs in, we've reached 57m, making this long already. But then it's time for the title track, because NGR presumably stands for The New Golgotha Repvbliq, and this wildly ambitious piece is over twenty minutes long. And, if that's not enough, my edition has a tenth song, titled Nothing, which adds another ten. An hour and a half of this ought to be unbearable but it's magnetic. I listened to this in entirety three times yesterday and a fourth time today as I translated my notes into an actual review.

To suggest that there's a lot here is a major understatement. It's not remotely going to be something that everyone's going to appreciate. This is very niche material, but if you're someone who likes how genres can be merged and subverted into something new and if you're someone who reads The Wire as often as your favourite metal magazine, this may be the best album you've heard in forever.

Andvaka - Andvana (2019)

Country: Iceland
Style: Funeral Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 27 Nov 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Metal Archives

The holiday season tends to be a happy time of year for most, whatever name they give it and whatever faith they follow or don't. Most, of course, means not all so here's something for the rest of the world that isn't happy right now. What Andvaka do is described as funeral doom, melancholic doom or post-doom, depending on where you look. They don't sound happy but they do sound very good indeed.

I have no idea who's in the band, but they apparently include members of the Icelandic black metal band Zakaz, whose musicians all go by roman numerals, just like the tracks on this album. I guess they really want the music to do the talking, which it does. It's not much for a couple of minutes, just slow dirge tones, but then it kicks in with vocals and everything has perspective all of a sudden because that's not the voice I expected.

Initially, this sounds ritualistic, especially when the tones add a hypnotic feel three minutes in to Partur I. According to their Facebook page, Andvaka means "spirit invocation" and I can feel a primal spirituality here. Over on their Bandcamp page, this album is described in religious terms as a "three-part series of hymns". Certainly, there's a reverence to the chanting, as if the band members are monks. It's too dark to suggest Gregorian doom, but the thought isn't too far away during the midsection.

Partur I ends with melancholy and the realisation that eight minutes went by surprisingly quickly, given how slow the music is. The last couple are quiet guitar and what sounds like a distant echoing harpsichord in a sweet duet. I love contrast and this is a very light section compared to the darkness that came before, with not only that ritual chanting but also a section of death growls in the middle.

Partur II and Partur III both revisit some of the same territory, but at an even slower pace. If Partur I is clearly doom, Partur II is clearly funeral doom. It's achingly slow for a long while and that includes the vocals, as if the whole thing was recorded at 45rpm but I'm playing it at 33rpm. I did realise that i we sped it back up, the few fast changes would sound insane! Partur III starts out with a gorgeous slow ritual groove.

I enjoyed this, as a sort of antidote to the whole Christmas spirit. I can't say that I'm unhappy nowadays but this gave me a break from the particularly forced happiness that Christmas requires from us. It's great mood music for a very different mood and, by that, I mean a sort of dark spirituality. It's as full of inherent beauty as it is of crushing sorrow. Listen to it in the dark, reflect yourself in it and enjoy forty minutes when you don't have to smile at everyone else.

I'm a little at a loss as to why it's divided up into three parts. None is a particularly coherent third of a whole, though the long gaps between each of Partur I, II and III underline that that's how we should see it. None of the thirds feels entirely like one piece of music: there are still movements and interludes and wild changes in each of them. They're also not remotely close in length, lasting eight minutes, eleven and a half and well over twenty, so it's nowhere near balanced.

Even though I don't know why we get the three hymns that we do, I like this and it's presumably a musical departure for those involved. While this does offer nods to depressive black metal, it doesn't ever really go there, being content to take doom metal as its base and create something new out of it. I wonder if there are other spiritual doom bands out there building a movement of sorts. This one hails from Iceland but there's something quintessentially northern about it and I could imagine Russian bands creating something like this out of doom metal and Eastern Orthodox ritual. Let's dig.

Roaring Empyrean - Cosmic (2019)

Country: Iran
Style: Funeral Doom Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 8 Jun 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Instagram

There were a few reasons why I added music reviews to Apocalypse Later this year, on top of the book reviews I've been writing since 2014 and the film reviews I've been writing since 2007, but one was discovery. Everything at Apocalypse Later revolves around discovery and I wanted to see what was out there in the musical landscape of 2019 that I didn't know about. After all, modern music sucks, right? Nah, I wasn't buying that. What was I missing?

One discovery was Roaring Empyrean, a one man project from Iran that merged funeral doom with new age music, a counter-intuitive recipe that I couldn't imagine working but which somehow did. Well, Amir Asadi aka Doomed Shinobi, the one man who creates this intriguing music, found my review of Monuments and sent me a copy of his new EP, Cosmic. I've been looking forward to that point where a band I've reviewed releases new product so I can explore their growth. This EP marks the first repeat 'band' here at Apocalypse Later.

Monuments aimed to create soundscapes to evoke majestic creations, whether they were created by man or nature. This EP continues in that vein, each of the two instrumental tracks combining the slow and plodding beat of funeral doom with the swirling atmospheric joy of new age, a heady mixture of which I'm getting rather fond. It's often background music, easy to listen to and easy to be distracted from, but never for long as there are odd elements to draw us right back in again. Everything here is built from contrasts, even how we interact with it.

While the general approach is similar to Monuments, I'm also hearing a wild and abrasive edge on both tracks that goes beyond the clashing that we got on Mountains of Torment last time out. It's there in the metallic dissonance found in the second half of Pillars and it's especially there on Gates, from its very beginning, a gritty, almost industrial vibe underneath the new age electronica, like a Nine Inch Nails layer on music more overtly influenced by Tangerine Dream.

Of course, that makes it all the more eye-opening to suddenly catch a melody that's notably reminiscent of Abba's Lay All Your Love on Me, merely slowed down to the tempo of funeral doom. I'm enjoying the Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares vibe and focusing on that dark and jagged underlay when suddenly there's an Abba melody. The world of music is a glorious thing.

These two tracks are long, as you might imagine for instrumental tracks that serve as soundscapes. Pillars runs almost ten minutes and Gates almost nine, which is a decent amount for an EP. They develop and they end without ever outlasting their welcome, even on a fourth or fifth time through.

While I liked this, I think I liked Monuments more. If there's a flaw, it's a really odd one. The cover art is of a galaxy and the EP's title is Cosmic, so I presume this is aimed at taking us on a journey into space. I have to say that I didn't get that from the music at all. The darker edges took me to darker, more hellish places, which isn't a bad thing at all, but perhaps isn't what Asadi intended.

I enjoyed this and am eager to hear what he might conjure up next. In the meantime, this EP is available at Bandcamp for the paltry sum of one dollar (or more, if you're so inclined), so I highly recommend that you pop over there and pick up your copy.

Roaring Empyrean - Monuments (2019)

Country: Iran
Style: Funeral Doom Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 1 Apr 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Instagram

In keeping with this site's mission of discovery, here's something completely different. There's not a lot about Roaring Empyrean online, but some googling around suggests that it's the project of one man in Tehran, Iran called Amir Asadi.

He released an album called To Earth's Heart under this banner back in 2013 and a pair of EPs last year. What's odd is that Roaring Empyrean appears to be an exploration of contrasts, epitomised by two rather different musical styles: funeral doom metal and new age.

And yeah, that's a really odd combination! Funeral doom tends to be slow and crushing, a contemplation of mortality. New age, on the other hand, tends to be uplifting through nature, a celebration of existence. I was intrigued to find how Asadi merged the two and whether it could remotely work. Sure, Ahab and Enya each have four letter names but what middle ground could they find?

Having listened through Monuments a few times, I think it does work, as odd as it seems. As you can imagine, these are soundscapes so the hour that this album runs is taken up by four long tracks, a six minute intro and a brief interlude.

That intro, Into the Valley, sets the scene pretty well. It opens with what sounds like a cello, a dark and rich sound that's joined by traditional doom soon enough. It builds itself up as it tears itself down, which isn't a bad way to look at this album.

The first track proper is Cathedral of Thousand Hallways and the same thing happens on a much more epic scale. Rarely have I heard a song named so well! Even without the title, this would have transported me into a vast cathedral, so vast that it's easy to get lost, even though there's music all around to guide me back, albeit music echoing in the vastness. Was that a harpsichord? A carillon? Certainly that's a massive church organ. All these sounds collide within what is clearly the first monument.

The only catch to Cathedral of Thousand Hallways is that it fades out, after eleven minutes, rather than finding a better way to end. I certainly preferred it to Mountains of Torment, which got away from me. It's an intriguing piece, though, with plodding bass and crashing guitar. I presume the point here is that the title doesn't necessarily have to refer to manmade monuments but to ones that nature crafted into place too and it would be odd to see mountains of torment that didn't have, well, torment. There's plenty of that here, but an awe too at the sheer majesty of creation.

Dance of the Bleeding Earth is memorable though, very organic and mindful of the patterns of large complex systems in nature, especially during the later parts. It floats a lot in its early stages, as if close to the ground, but swells in the later ones, as if it's found a way to fly. I didn't grasp the bleeding but I presume Asadi had a vision of some sort in mind.

As the title might suggest, The Soaring Essence goes a lot more for swelling than floating. It's certainly the most uplifting piece, even though it never speeds up its drums. It's the strings that do it, even though there's a neat Beethoven-esque piano underneath it all as if to remind us that there's still ground below. What seems odd is that the strings get more and more curious as the track runs on.

I'm happy I found this album, because it does something different. Depending on the perspective you bring with you, it's either the most cheerful funeral doom or the darkest new age music that you've ever heard. Now I know what it sounds like, I can grasp it and The Soaring Essence, all sixteen minutes of it, suddenly feels like a statement. After all, the point where fundamentally different genres meet is the point where new ones are born.

Quercus - Verferum (2019)

Country: Czechia
Style: Funeral Doom Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

I can't listen to funeral doom every day but there are times when I like nothing more than to throw on some Ahab and chill. Next time I get into that sort of mood, I might well switch over to Quercus instead, because there are some sounds in here that are a sheer delight. I liked the first five relentlessly heavy minutes of Ceremony of the Night, for instance, but then they switched gears on me for the second five and I was grinning like a madman at the audacity of the change. That also set up the last five, making it a real three act play of a track and I loved it.

Quercus hail from Plzeň (or Pilsen) in Czechia and their name translates from the Latin as 'oak'. Maybe they're reliable enough to live up to that moniker and I ought to seek out their last couple of albums, Sfumato and Heart with Bread, to check. These most recent three albums all arrived within a six year period but their debut, Postvorta, lies a further seven years adrift into the past and is apparently a rather avant-garde piece with a variety of guest vocalists including a cat. Yes, you heard right.

As you might expect from funeral doom, this runs long but with a skimpy track listing. Verferum lasts over an hour but it only contains four tracks, the shortest of which is still over ten minutes in length. The longest, which wraps up the album, is well over double that and its title highlights the key influence this time out, which is Johann Sebastian Bach, who composed Passacaglia in C Minor. Quercus lift their composition up to D Minor.

That gear shift in Ceremony of the Night is heralded by a pipe organ like we might expect to hear in an old church and that instrument returns at points throughout, courtesy of keyboardist, Markko Pišl. His contributions to the album, if I'm able to distinguish them correctly, are more varied than those of his compatriots, Ondřej Klášterka on guitars and drums and Lukáš Kudrna on bass amongst other instruments which I'm unable to list. I'm presuming that the keyboards are responsible for the more atmospheric sounds, including the space age ones early in Journey of the Eyes.

It's that church organ sound that's most memorable though and it bookends the album and indeed the final track, Passacaglia D Minor, White and Black Darkness, which is a long, heavy trip that's nothing like I heard in church back in my early years. It's a deep immersive slab of doom that sucks us into its world, leaving us surprised that we were under its spell for over twenty-three minutes. However many times I listen to it, it still feels like a six minute track.

There's nothing here as memorable as the beginning of Ahab's The Call of the Wretched Sea, but the songs are longer and they both invite us in more subtly and reward us in a deeper way. This is an album to explore in a dark room through headphones and that's a pretty good way to start 2019.