Review Summary: Warning: Those with heart conditions may not ride. Side effects may include: nausea, anxiety attacks, lowered self confidence, stained underwear, and/or death.
Dark ambient is a tough genre to get into for most people. It’s long, it’s gloomy, and sometimes it’s just plain scary. However, I must be pretty strange. I have always liked dark ambient. I love laying back, closing my eyes, and getting lost in the subtle nuances that the genre brings. Artists such as
Lustmord and
Atrium Carceri have expanded and perfected the genre in their own way. With
Morals and Dogma,
Deathprod have crafted an album that goes back to the simpler ways of dark ambient.
Unlike some of their peers, they refrain from including samples of pagan rituals, screaming murder victims, and other ridiculously jarring sounds. Now you can take that however you want because it can be a drawback, depending on if that is a major part of what you like about the genre. Missing pagan sacrifice rituals aside, the album does its job, but only if you are paying attention. It isn’t exactly the kind of album the grabs your attention and pulls you through to the end. Instead you have to sit back and immerse yourself in the music. The eeriness of the album is caused by the little things that slowly get added into the songs. Each song starts off in somewhat of the same fashion. It begins with a deep, dark wave of white (black?) noise. The songs drone on for a while, getting more intense and slowly adding more subtle sounds, always coming in waves; louder and louder, deeper and deeper, until your ears are consumed by a musical fog. It never stops. When you think it has relaxed a bit, you get hit with another wave, this time with more things happening. There is no climax; there is no break, only a slow sonic assault that keeps coming until the end when it finally just… stops.
As mentioned before, the things that make this album what it is can also be a deterrent to some listeners. It’s simple, yet effective approach can be hard to swallow. You aren’t going to find any fancy avant-garde techniques. However if you like to sit back and absorb the music, you won’t have much of a problem liking this.
