Review Summary: I’m going off the rails on a crazy train
Asylum’s Lament marks the debut of Dutch/Belgian trio Stuporous. Promotional materials describe the release as inspired by “mental disorders” and “true events at the psychiatric facility”, while aspiring for the impact of a “nightmare maelstrom” on the listener. With those thoughts in mind, I went into this release with the reasonable expectation that it would be an album describable as, well, pick a word, any word -
creepy?...
disturbing?...
unhinged?...
As one of those scaredy-cats who largely avoids horror movies, it may seem strange that I don’t necessarily shy away from music which aims for that kind of shock value. I guess I just feel like extreme metal should sometimes be, well,
extreme. In this case, though, Stuporous has ultimately kept the hinges attached more than I might’ve assumed. This is less an utterly deranged album than a dutifully executed black/doom/post-metal hybrid, accentuated by avant-garde touches and beautifully dreamlike softer moments. While there may be some periodic qualms to be had,
Asylum’s Lament proves to be a well-crafted beginning to a new band’s existence, even if it’s a notably different beast than I’d anticipated.
The album’s seven tracks feel like they can be grouped broadly into two buckets - the first being fairly straightforward metal “bangers”, and the second being more complex tracks leaning into greater sophistication and atmosphere. Of the former, “Throne of Madness” delivers as a crunching piece of blackened doom, while closer “The Voice That Made Me Do It” feels like a loathsome crawl (in the best way) through a ten-plus minute runtime, replete with some of the album’s most ferocious vocals. Meanwhile, in the latter category we find songs like “Desperation”, featuring dramatic clean vocals and prominent dreary horns, and “Distorted Echoes”, a drifting and gloomy chunk of metal which aims to create its own ominous world. The album’s centerpiece, “Decorating the Willow Tree” manages to bring together the record’s trends most convincingly, with the faster-paced sections roaring with relentless heaviness while its conclusion captures a sweeping feeling of melancholy and decayed grandeur.
In a previous paragraph, I mentioned some qualms. The predominant one is simply that I’d love some more room to breathe for Stuporous’ gentle side, which seems to elevate the proceedings here and there when it’s allowed to shine. Moments like the synthy Gothic vibe of the beginning of “Never Let Me Go” or the piano notes which introduce “Distorted Echoes” do yeoman’s work in enhancing the emotions behind the preoccupying focus of
Asylum’s Lament, that of the struggles of those whose own minds have betrayed them, and the ill treatment those unlucky souls suffer at the hands of a cold society, so a little more attention to these delicate details would do wonders. And, I’ll gripe that the obligatory short instrumental intro track “Parasidious Preludium” is a bit too wispy and slight even by the “graded on a curve” standard of interludes of its ilk, not feeling like it builds much at all into the record’s aimed-for atmosphere. But, bottom line,
Asylum’s Lament is a commendable album, successfully blending black metal, doom metal, post-metal (and hints of other genres beyond) into a sometimes harrowing and always moody listen. I’ll be on the lookout for future releases.
