Lovingly pinched from Lurker: “Memories long faded return to me from out of the darkness. Even now, I disintegrate in their presence. It turns my stomach into broken glass. In the end, I’ll find myself where I began. And I shall start again.”
So begins Elend, the first full-length release from o.68, otherwise known as Odpörovät 1968 (a reference to a revolutionary occurrence in the Czech Republic), a one-man funeral doom menace from Germany. Little else can be said about the mind from which these sombre anthems spring, other than the fact that Elend is an insipid monument to pain and sorrow. From the despairing spoken-word introduction of opener ‘Mornau’, very little light manages to escape the dense layers that follow and those who revel in the darkest melancholia will find plenty of solace in this album.
Across eight tracks, Elend winds through some intensely sullen, snail-paced dirgery. Tortured death vocals gurgle and scrape across a meandering mire of labyrinthine riffs, with lyrics obsessed with the finality of death and the beckoning end of this tiresome world. Sparse dark ambient sections fraught with intriguing samples trade off with bass-heavy pummelling. Unlike many funeral doom acts, however, who focus on one strict form of attack, o.68 is many-headed beast offering up a varied experience that crosses over into realms nary spliced with the genre. This is funeral doom… with a groove.
Continue reading: Odpörovät 1968 – Elend | LURKER.
Released on January 7th (via Ireland’s Ominous Silence), Elend is limited to 250 copies so pick up yours here. Samples can be found here, but they barely detail the epic scope of the album. Support the independent and visionary fire of the underground!
Tags: Album of the day, doom, Lurker, Odpörovät 1968
This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 5:35 pm and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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