Review Summary: The suffocating Jupiterian alter ego that won’t get lost in big brother’s shadow.
Fossilization is the process of turning the dead into a fossil. Fossilization is a project of two members of the Brazilian sludge-doom band Jupiterian, who released one of the best albums of last year – Protosapien. On Protosapien, man was a destroyer, cancer in the world’s womb; on He Whose Name Was Long Forgotten, he’s just an accidental victim of entropy; inanimate fossilized material. Brazilians renounce humanity and cry out for Apocalypse.
Fossilization’s Apocalypse explodes with feverish blastbeats that felt like a breath of air before the inevitable plunge into the sinkholes of sludge-doom. Tremolo guitars and bass gnaw at the rock, and a drum crushes the skulls of human remains spewed up by the soil. Matter becomes energy, energy annihilates matter.
Spatially, the album is directed downwards, like the subsidence of the soil. The funnel of music pulls you to where the Sun is dead, the skin is rotting, and the bones become stone. With each song, you are squeezed more and more, it becomes impossible to breathe. When you can no longer move, your lungs fill with earth to the sound of percussion, the soil digests you while worms are swarming in the rock around you.
«From man to a disformed mass
Devoured
Thrown to the worms
Consumed by the verminous mouth»
And here you are, one of the petrified, blind, and deaf witnesses to the permanent decay of the worlds. With the emptiness of your eye sockets, you gaze into the black horizon, absorb the heat of the poisonous air with your bones, and through the dead ether, you can hear how the Brazilians are clearing the Heavenly City of angels, burning their nests ("with burning feathers, I'll set the skies free"). This is not Schopenhauer's view on death, not an endless cycle of renewal, but the inevitable splitting into molecules, which in the end will also be gone.
Evolution is only an illusion. The one whose name was long forgotten knows that time will erase every ray, dry up every drop and close itself in itself, becoming a figure without shapes and sizes, a flower of screaming emptiness weighing as much as the Universe.
