In the Depths of R'lyeh

I had waited a long time for the man behind Hierophant to finally record a full-length release, but by the time this album was announced, I had honestly given up.

Back when the Hierophant was still releasing material, funeral doom seemed like a genre ripe with possibility. I then just discovering bands like Thergothon and Esoteric, and now here was this new band, very much like the other heavyweights of the style but as different from them as they were from one another. What other exciting artistic developments could come from this burgeoning, untapped subgenre?

As it turns out: nothing! Or very near to it. What a crushing disappointment this whole “funeral doom” business has been: lots of gimmicks and amateurs, not too many real ideas, and it’s impossibly hard to sort out the good stuff.

We can consider ourselves lucky that Xathagorra Mlandroth (who previously released music under the pseudonym “J. Del Russi”) saw fit to return, and that he brought with him the artistry that we would hope for. This is easily the best release he’s unleashed yet, in my opinion.

Catacombs sounds like death/doom distillate – the pure essence that bands like Disembowelment and Thergothon hinted at, abstracted into its base elements and then made concrete again. Aesthetically, it’s sparse but essential: a downtuned guitar, a higher-pitched one, drums, death vocals, and quite a bit of repetition.

Articulation is more important than style, and it’s a quality that funeral doom bands tend to lack… they usually have very conventional riffing, and any embellishments for the sake of originality get smeared over the top and are tangential. In the end, the atmosphere comes more from the aesthetics than the execution, and it gets old really fast because there just isn’t anything to the music.

Catacombs, by contrast, is heavy on execution, although it’s stripped down to its barest elements. I’m reminded of albums like Transilvanian Hunger or some of Burzum’s music, where there’s not much there, but what is there has been carefully arranged to the point of perfection. I’ve listened to this album countless times, and I can anticipate every transition, every shift in the drum beat, even every slight waver in guitar tone. The songwriting's great, but it’s not the common notion of what “songwriting” ought to sound like. On the other hand, it’s not amorphous, meandering ambiance, either. It lives and breathes by lopsided time signatures and weird melodies and guitar bends: the geometry is all wrong. Even moments of silence are used consciously. The production is perfect as well.

Music like this has been attempted by many, but it’s never been done this perfectly.
A lot of effort could be put into attempting to analyze just how this album is working, probably without bearing much fruit. It should be enough to note that it possesses an intuitive understanding of how to convey atmosphere and ambiance, through everything from melody to production. One Hierophant track was re-recorded for this album, and it’s amazing to consider how different it feels than the original, in spite of being essentially the same song. It’s an example of how finely-tuned that above-mentioned intuition is, that such powerful ambiance can be achieved with so little apparent effort. Every tiny subtlety and nuance is precisely on target.

Catacombs is pure darkness and demands an overactive imagination. Only one song has explicitly Lovecraftian lyrics but the whole album aims to confront the listener with an incomprehensible horror, as well as the possibility of an undetected reality more powerful and significant than the mundane one in which we typically participate. Put this album on late at night and really take it in.