Dull, rumbling, and rusted sharp-edged Death/Funeral Doom with the cold, glowing bile of Sludge. Flickering, roaring, and viscous with deep guttural output from the asshole of hell.

Last to Mourn by Burial Fog oscillates between violent fantasies and the metaphorical loss of sunlight, describing the kind of filth and darkness in which the entire “disgusted, putrid, tormented” (To Live, To Suffer) human exsistence wallows. Oh Hello, Mr. Schopenhauer: “Man is essentially a wild, terrible beast. We only know it in the state of being tamed and subdued, which is called civilization.” The album moves forward in an almost chaos-gnostic yearning for emptiness and reaches its ultimate revelation in the climax of the third track, Crumbling Abysm – the symbolic destruction of the self negates the divine order and the entire existence.

Renunciation of the World

In this almost chaos-gnostic rejection of existence itself, the symbolic suicide becomes the final separation from that order which created space for the individual. The resulting assault on God becomes an act of liberation from a constant, predestined cosmic framework that determines life. An approach to Camus’ philosophy of the absurd, in which the human being, aware of the absurdity of his life, is forced to react. Camus describes this condition as the inevitable conflict between the human urge to find meaning and the meaninglessness of the world – a struggle that, in a common misquotation of Camus, takes place between coffee and suicide in the morning, and for Burial Fog, culminates in a symbolic suicide. The renunciation of the world becomes a cathartic release, seemingly freeing one from the burden of existence.

“Face down on the earthen floor,
no more shall god betray the fate of man,
one last breath of desperate life,
aimless,
beyond the abysm crumbling
the altar
the throne” (Crumbling Abysm)

It is a renunciation of the world in the final self-elevation, culminating in an absurdity that ruthlessly weaves existentialism and chaos together.

Between Sludge and Funeral Doom

The explosive rage against life is simultaneously reflected in the lyrics and the music as a representation of one’s own hatred and embodiment of the despised life. An idea that the band brings to life in a moloch of distortions and booming effects between Sludge and Funeral Doom. A brutally massive drumbeat that, at a sluggish, monotonous pace, accurately portrays the predestined rhythm of the suffocating life without any outbreaks. A dirty ruin of sound as a symbol of the tragedy of human existence, moving forward in a constant, pointless progression with no escape – the music becomes an tonal expression of existential captivity, precisely capturing the idea and atmosphere of the lyrics and forming an image that expresses the rage over the suffocating reality from which the self can only escape in an act of symbolic self-destruction.

Accomplished, but certainly not perfect – and for many purists, probably not the preferred approach to the genre. All the elements of ambient, the frozen inertia, the elegy, the keyboard – they’re all missing here. Instead, what dominates is brutal riffing that stretches into the feedbacks of sludge. Burial Fog may prove to be of interest to open-minded listeners as a boundary-pushing act.