Praeparet Bellum

The latest album from veteran death doomsters Rigor Sardonicous showcases their dirge ridden brand of industrial death doom in ever increasing iterations of entropic decay brilliantly. Hailing from Long Island, this outfit have been crafting their own form of minimalist, ruminant death metal for many years now. If Japan’s Anatomia offer a psychedelically nightmarish take on Autopsy, then Rigor Sardonicous opt for the cheekier route, working in horror, satire, sadism and whimsy into what is still an undeniably downbeat corner of extreme metal.

Although the most obvious element of their sound to point out as the use of a drum machine, this is not as superficial an observation as it may first appear. Much like Mortician’s fragmented, drum machine driven deathgrind, the simplicity is only skin deep. The basic, metronomic pulses, periodic crash cymbals, and supressed bass drum hits occurring at a frequency just below the perceptual present, all encased within a precision and malevolent patience that only a machine can achieve. As this rhythmic dynamic weaves its way through music that unravels itself from the oppressive to the funereal, the predictability of the tempo quickly morphs into inevitability, a lurking, unstoppable slog to finality.

The guitars themselves work through dirt simple chord progressions of tritone infused doom, articulating moments of tension, release, aggression, monotony, and depression in achingly slow real time. The spaces between each thudding chord seem to lengthen as the album progresses and an unstoppable process of decay sets in at ever deeper levels. Vocals are naturally pitched at the lower limits of human hearing, offering a reliable hum of low end static to supplement the unbearably scant textural offering found on ‘Praeparet Bellum’

Given how musically barren these pieces are, this makes the listener claw with glee at the fragments of melodic or harmonic ornamentation that are hinted at across these pieces. They serve to signpost our way through the murk, offering brief but welcome respite from the atonal lamentations that function as the backbone of this album. But ultimately, this is an appeal that pivots on absence. Absence of melody, activity, variety, motion. All are conspicuously lacking. This is not simply because Rigor Sardonicous failed to include these common musical signifiers. Rather, the space where these elements should sit is the entire centrepiece of their style. The project is focused on producing a musical framework that poses as a vessel for additional content, and failing to provide this makes us both deeply uncomfortable whilst encouraging us to continue listening in the hope that something more might appear, even if we know deep down that nothing ever will.

Originally published at Hate Meditations