Review Summary: i'm afraid, dave
Wanna lurch? Reverence to Paroxysm lurches hard, a death doom outfit whose debut
Lux Morte navigates the genre's dismal tropes similar to the likes of Spectral Voice with razing waves of bone cold riffs, grooves that sound like being boiled in slime, and neurotic leads and atmosphere.
An immediate standout in the mix is the bass guitar which makes me think of a huge worm: one that monstrously wriggles, slithers and occasionally writhes hard like you know when you see a worm just freaking out; flailing and constricting in on itself as if were trying to tie itself in a knot or maybe escape from its own skin? These thrums are simultaneously disturbing and mesmerising. The deep vocals join the bass on the album's low end with rapturous growls that often register strongly on the gurglometer with gutturals reminiscent of bands like Rottrevore.
Truly,
Lux Morte is seeping at the seams with darkness and maintains a very tomby atmosphere thoughout, but tentative illuminations flicker here and there in the form of melancholic and melodic leads. These sections adorn the muscular low end like morbid veins and beautifully express the sense of utter dejection and defeat that is quintessential to doom. The quality of
Lux Morte's riffs and arrangements enable it to explore a surprisingly wide breadth of ideas in the leads like the unsettling drones towards the end of "Necrocapacity", the trad-doomy depression in "Portals to Dark Misery" and the hypnotic tremolo that closes "Care Data Vermibus".
As well as impending death, there is a sense of methodical calculation frequently felt throughout
Lux Morte which is crystallised by the intermittently reappearing sample of a deep and barely intelligible voice. This voice is that of HAL 9000, the artificial superintelligence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, quoted as it pleads/rambles nonsense while succumbing to deletion and non-existence. This is a subtle but successful subversion of the traditionally classic horror-concerned tropes of death doom into a more topical contemplation of the horrifying implications of the relationship between humanity and AI. The thought - that no matter the advancements made in the power of such technological brains, these entities are condemned to the same fate of and death and doom as us mortals and will ultimately join us in the dust and darkness - is heavy, and so is
Lux Morte.
