Apocalypsis Damnare

I first heard of this band flipping through some online catalog or label website and I was not expecting much. Apparently they were some sort of ultra-extreme death doom band – okay, that sounds good – that had languished in obscurity since their inception over a decade ago – well, perhaps not so good. Truly obscure bands usually earn their obscurity the honest way, and even as something of a death doom enthusiast, Rigor Sardonicous had remained completely unknown to me. How good could they possibly be?

Thank the devil for mp3 samples, because I knew after just a few seconds of listening that I was going to buy this. Just a few times in my life I’ve been so overwhelmed by the sheer awesomeness of a band’s aesthetic on first exposure that I actually laughed in sick glee. Demoncy’s Joined in Darkness comes to mind as an example. If you’ve heard that one, you should know what I mean. Another example would be Rigor Sardonicous.

Even at this point in the game, where extreme doom is ubiquitous and poking around beneath a storage shed with a flashlight is likely to reveal an infestation of funeral doom bands, you’re not going to mistake Rigor Sardonicous for any other band. The guitars are downtuned straight to hell, as you would expect, but they’re more of a hum than a buzz – a continual low-frequency shockwave piped directly into the subconscious. The drumming impressed me right away with its weird ritualistic overtones, a little (a very little) like Skepticism. In reality it’s a drum machine, and stands as a handy refutation of the notion that a drum machine must necessarily sound fake and mechanical.

And then there are the vocals, which are pitch shifted. That’s probably going to stick out more than anything else, at least on first listen. It would be a bit redundant to point out that you’ll either love them or hate them since that goes for every other aspect of the band’s sound as well.

The songwriting is primitive, stripped down to virtually nothing, with the natural side effect of placing extra emphasis on what is there, and relies equally on the ambiance of the notes hanging in the air as the melody of the riffing. Instead of moving forward with an apparent groove, the music just sinks – sinks in. In general, this is a very off-kilter band, with a unique outlook and approach, and it would be difficult to catalog all of the ways in which this is true, but even in what one might presume to be a fairly limited style of music, they don’t do anything in a stereotypical or clichéd way.

The band’s self-described label is “Raw Apocalyptic Doom” and that is as accurate as anything I could hope to come up with. They are artistic but not “artsy” and the atmosphere conveyed by their music differs markedly from the elegance and nobility aspired to by so many other metal bands; it makes me think of cockroaches crawling through the ruins after the bombs drop. Not for everyone, naturally, but definitely for me.

(This album, incidentally, is a re-recorded version of an earlier release which I have not heard in full, and the effect of the production is good enough that I presume it to be an improvement.)