Mer Morte

Originally this album came out on vinyl on a Spanish label so the music was split into two pieces. Now that it's on CD, the two pieces have been reunited into one long hard-hitting droning doomathon though you can still hear the pause halfway through the recording and the second half becomes more intense than the first, more atmospheric half. There is a female vocal operating mostly as part of the dark ambient backdrop than as an essential part of the music or even leading it with actual lyrics but apart from this the entire work is instrumental and improvised. Looking at the list of helpers in the sleeve credits, I see a few acts I've had some familiarity with in the past - folks like Corrupted, Grey Daturas, SOMA of Sunn0))) among others - which are no surprise as Monarch's work is very similar to these acts in some ways, especially in the way the musicians consider atmosphere, structure and ways of playing their instruments. I haven't heard much Grey Daturas lately but what I do remember of their first album was a noisy rock improv that included dark and foreboding blues-tinged ambient mood music. Sunn0)))'s brand of doom drone at its most minimal is not very different from what Monarch offer here though if anything Monarch is much, much slower and their sound is more bleak.

Just a couple of down-tuned guitars and a basic set of drums are all that's needed to create this desolate and sometimes eerie, even creepy, soundtrack to a journey that ends in a black doom finality where all humanity and its creations will receive their ultimate judgement and the reward - or punishment - to match. Each pounding drumbeat, each swooping chord forces us to go closer to that dreaded moment. The woman in the background wails, screams and moans as though she already knows the dismal fate awaiting us all yet is unable to help us or warn us to reconsider our ways. The music can be sparing and minimal to the point where all that can be heard is the streaming vibration of a just-collapsed guitar chord - you can even sense invisible bow-waves of sound beyond what you can hear trailing in the chord's wake - but it's so single-minded and relentless that the momentum is never lost and the musicians pick up the thread of what's gone long before very quickly even when they've had enough time to pop out of the studio for a cigarette and coffee break. Yes, the spaces within the music can be that long. Above our heads, cavernous space yawns widely but offers no possibility of escape or relief - on the contrary, the airy nothingness reinforces our sense of being trapped and helpless in our inevitable odyssey.

Judgement, when it's pronounced, isn't as crushing and melodramatic as might be expected - there are no effects here other than what's necessary to make the screaming sound far away and despairing - but the sentence proves to be pretty bleak if rather uncertain and a quiet bell signals the end. Perhaps this is to suggest that anything we might suffer on the physical plane in the way of punishment is nothing compared to spiritual oblivion.

Surprisingly the music is not of the extreme skull-crushing, heavy-gravel type of droning doom metal even though the theme might call for it: the sound is actually fairly clean and not too gritty. The musicians rely more on pace and volume control to create a hellish soundscape of huge black emptiness and the journey we must take through it, and to weave into this world a sense of oppression, despair and hopelessness. The sparing use of percussion means that when we do hear the occasional drumbeat, it seems louder and more portentous than it really does, and the space between drumbeats becomes an agonising wait for the listeners, knowing that the next drumbeat means the moment of truth is just that little bit closer. This is definitely a work where less in the way of theatrics and thrills really does give us more in impression, atmosphere and mood.

As depressive and harrowing mood music, this recording hits the mark: it's filled with foreboding and dread of what is to come, it lacks hope and there is the feeling of resignation and acceptance of one's fate. If oblivion is our due, we must go to it quietly and leave nothing behind. Surely there are few things more terrible than this message the album seems to convey. Some of us can fight and resist all we want and as hard as we can to keep our ideals and beliefs alive, but in the end these will die with us too.

At this point I'll take an alternative stand and suggest that perhaps the album as a whole is too accepting of what's going to happen to us. If the theme had included some kind of resistance (spiritual, existential) to our fate, there would be potential for tension within the music which could be expressed by, say, competing guitars and that might have made for a more varied and interesting work. More emotion could be expressed and there would be greater reason and scope for experimenting with pace, volume dynamics and guitar sound textures.

Unstructured as it is with few repeating riffs and melodies, and with long stretches of space between drumbeats and guitar chords linked by the most precarious threads of sound, this recording won't have a very wide appeal and it'll be mainly those folks familiar with similar drone doom metal and experimental approaches to creating and playing music generally who will appreciate this album and Monarch's style of doom metal. By comparison even Sunn0))) and Corrupted sound fairly speedy, fussy in their style and much more cheerful and optimistic than this bunch.