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Pestilength > Solar Clorex > Reviews > we hope you die
Pestilength - Solar Clorex

Ambition and hesitancy - 70%

we hope you die, February 26th, 2024

Enigmatic death/doom/black metallers Pestilength return for an album wide in scope yet compact in execution. The latter feature certainly deserves accolades, not least because they temper their ever expanding horizons with an awareness and dedication to their own identity. Their strength lies in transferring the older language of death/doom into a modern context in a way that avoids both mere replication and an over reliance on swelling chasmic dirge at the expense of all content.

‘Solar Clorex’ presents a much more direct, modest front than previous effort ‘Basom Gryphos’. The production leans into an intimate organicism, light on reverb, even a little frugal with distortion, allowing the guitars to undulate around more complex, meandering riff patterns, background mechanics in full view. Pestilength mimic and in large part outdo the majority of self professed Lovecraftian metal of recent years in this regard. The riff package lurks somewhere between Incantation (as one would expect), supplemented by eerie Finnish surrealism. Modest percussive punches provide much needed contouring given the fact that the tempos for the most part lurk a few notches lower than modern death metal listeners are used to.

Pestilength give themselves licence to shine within the intersection of the celebrated “mid-pace” supplemented by riffs richer in information than the usual bargain basement OSDM act. One is reminded of ‘Soulside Journey’ in spirit if not in content for a similar approach to death metal. It eschews doom as a project of merely bludgeoning the listener with funereal aplomb, and instead reaches for the eldritch via unpredictable riff shapes, rendered naked and knowable in their laboured delivery, but always adopting unexpected or unsettling forms, holding on refrains for longer than is comfortable before dwelling on a convoluted link phrase of opaque but never redundant teleology.

This is not a flawless effort however. A surplus post rock breakdown in ‘Enthronos Wormwomb’ immediately arrests the momentum of the album, sapping both the rich arrangements and uncanny riff shapes of their mojo. ‘Dilution Haep’ attempts a recapitulation of Steve Tucker era Morbid Angel through its aggressively depressed pacing and its unpredictable microcosms packed within reliably consistent meta sequences, but Pestilength’s approach to this is too linear and transparent to bring the material to life. The mid section of the album is scattered with other such moments where repetition becomes a crutch for want of direction, relying on drum variations or limited dynamics to bring the overworked material a new lease of life.

Ultimately though, Pestilength deserve praise for pushing, teasing, or otherwise disrupting the borders of their chosen field whilst performing a rearguard action of impressive creativity, not just raising questions but furnishing us with possible answers. Despite a lacklustre mid section, they do enough across ‘Solar Clorex’ to convince us that this remains a death metal outfit worth watching. One conversant in the language of genre, and willing to take risks in order to stretch its well worn grammar to breaking point.

Originally published at Hate Meditations