Prelude- ” You are only here to suffer”
Here, at the end of all things (as Frodo so eloquently affirms to Sam), in the postlude of Yuletide, we look up not to see Santa driving his sleigh off to the North Pole, nor do we see an ethereal star in the east shining over us. We behold “Black Ash” raining like blood upon us, thrashing the darkened sky with a thick asphyxiation that even Morgoth cannot penetrate.
It falls from Panama and is the latest full-length from Doomslut, the product of Jaibana Records mastermind, Lebzul. Yet, there is nothing tonally promiscuous about this latest offering. We are lured into a world devoid of light and angelic fragrance, where all hope has left and been replaced by mournful dirges, barely clinging to hot shafts of air from an ephemeral volcano that has just materialized to vomit its darkness upon us.
1 – “Lost in Darkness”
Descriptive overkill notwithstanding, I am immensely impressed by Lebzul’s latest offering. Whereas his previous releases were straightforward incursions into funeral doom, this one forces us to listen for a moment to low, droning synth pads, mixed in the foreground. “Crimson Rivers” drowns us in complete anthesis before a guitar woefully guides us to the main theme. The corpus of the track is ushered in by Lebzul’s low but clear guttural vocals. This is a track stripped bare of all pomp and circumstance, exposing the listener to the declaration of “You are only here to suffer,” an epithet balefully stating the absolute futility of existence.
The vocals are stacked on top of each other, one high and one low, a feature uncommon in funeral doom where the vocals are typically just low and guttural. We hear Lebzul’s pain in this unusual delivery.
What strikes me most about this album is its plausible simplicity, a morose declaration of the inevitable end of humankind. Although it is a very common theme in funeral doom, perhaps “Crimson Rivers” is the most convincing harbinger.
2 – “I Vanish into Ether”
The title track, “Black Ash,” begins with all guns blazing at a cumbersome 40 bpm. I am immediately pleased with the snare on this song, as it is well mixed and hits on the second and fourth beat of the measure. Why is this important, we ask? Typically, a funeral doom snare will land on the third beat of the measure, creating a sense of space, giving the illusion of a slower-than-normal tempo. Not so in this instance. Lebzul’s drums, though basic in nature, need no illusion here. They propel us further into the ashen morass. The synths return in this song, higher in voicing, more prominent than the guitars, and prepare the way for a “bowels of hell.” The high growls take the lead, asserting, “Crumbling down, your emotions I feel, pick up the pieces and burn them down.” It is buttressed against an earlier statement of “As above, so below,” perhaps the quintessential saying in Hermeticism. One important factor of this title track exists here: The song rarely drifts away from a single chord progression. The synths here are used, I believe, in a meditative way, a dark hypnosis bolstered by Lebzul’s bleak lyrics. It is revealed to us that we will not survive this baleful existence.
3 – “A Dissolving Spirit”
In the middle of the album, Lebzul casually utters, “Sorry, we fucked.” As tongue-in-cheek as it may seem, no apology is offered in this song. The opening sample in the beginning is a warning for us to stay clear of “the doomsphere.” The narrator goes on to posit that our way of life is doomed, and we just need to accept it. What is great about this track is that it bears a sonic resemblance to early Skinny Puppy songs, where a sample or a speech plays, supported by a music bed. This happens here as the guitars are heavily washed in phasers and reverbs. Their function is purely aesthetic, leaving room for the narrator to espouse impending doom on us all.
4 – “Falls into the Void”
Lastly, “Infernal Source of Turmoil” proves to be the “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” of the album, clocking in at 11 minutes and 26 seconds. One of the many elements that cause this track to stand out is that it functions as a dark ambient song at its inception, with a synth melody slyly sneaking in around the one-minute mark. Around the three-minute mark, the instruments assemble, but do so in a stark manner. The drums are now excruciatingly raw, sluggish, and devoid of life, only providing marginal timekeeping to the dark synths that permeate the track. Whereas the snare in the first track was warm and inviting, the snare here is completely stripped of all life, no reverb, no color, and ironically, such an absence adds a blackened, gray hue to the track. The vocals are inhumanly low and transform into whispers as all the instruments fade out, leaving only a solitary cymbal to strike out four beats, only to disappear. There is an ambient guitar awash in a phaser effect, a repeating line that echoes the dissolution of all things tonal. When the drums do return, they are still lifeless: percussive detritus providing only a skeletal rhythmic framework. The vocals vacillate uneasily from whispers to haphazard singing, only to materialize into the spectral growl.
Postlude – ” Nothing is what remains
Lebzul’s latest release is a difficult album to listen to. It will take several dedicated sojourns into his ashen realm to appreciate it fully. Very few elements aside from the synth pads are consistent. They are vaporous apparitions, appearing and disappearing at will, it seems. Yet, perhaps this is what Lebzul intended. He does not want us to be happy. On the contrary, the album is a testament to self-destruction, an exodus into an esoteric abstraction of reality. It is a forbidden journey into perversity, where the fates warn us of the impending doom that befalls humankind. We are the ones who are destroying ourselves and our planet because of lust and vanity. Lebzul is just holding us accountable for our actions. And rightly so. This release is by far his best and barely made it as one of my favorites of 2024. Yet, this matters not because, according to Lebzul, we are all dissolving spirits falling into the void. It just so happens, the soundtrack to our demise is a masterpiece.
