Ancient Obscurity: blackened doom sludge metal boasts lush ambience and Satanic splendour

Labyrinthine, Ancient Obscurity, self-released CD-R (2014)

Labyrinthine might be the project name but luckily the blackened doom style of this album is fairly easy to follow so the trip through the eight songs on offer is not too tortuous. That’s just as well as this is quite sprawling, plodding BM-slathered doom with plenty of dark intense and oppressive atmosphere, solemn melodies and screeching inhuman vocals at times duetting and duelling with a deeper, more daemonic howl. Mesmerising darkling lead guitar dominates on all songs though each instrument including bass can be heard very clearly, even though rhythm guitars are distorted and the production is just clear but still black.

The first half of the album tips the BM / doom more in favour of doom than BM; indeed, if the vocals were removed and replaced by clean-toned singing, the first four songs would be almost classic melodic doom with lumbering melodies and concrete-slab riffs, and the bass guitar sometimes rising above the whole trudging juggernaut with its own tunes. Only the distorted guitar tones and the heavy black ambience hint at an invisible BM influence. Come Track 5, “The Ichorous Portal”, and this song wakes you up with a mix of stuttery percussion, surges of lava-thick riffing, a deranged beat and a choir of raging, roaring daemons. This is the truly blackened doom part of the album with a demented air and moments of dark defiant Satanic majesty and splendour.

After “The Ichorous Portal”, the album settles back into laid-back melodic doom snarl but something about the whole recording has changed and you feel you can never take it for granted again. “Nexus of the Untold” and “Accordance” are essentially throwbacks to the album’s first half though the lead guitar now follows a more sinuous, Orientalist path and the record’s ambience seems more sinister and unhealthy. Sure enough the black metal side of Labyrinthine returns knocking incessantly on the final track and the drums inspire the tremolo guitars and the scowling vocals to escalate in intensity to a level where madness and chaos reign forever.

The music can be quite lush and dense and a few spins might be needed to appreciate the contributions of each and every instrument here: the guitars have a lot of detail in their melodies and on some songs create an exotic psychedelic (though still sinister and malevolent) atmosphere. The sound of the music has a dream-like quality in parts and the lead guitar can be hypnotic in its almost jewel-like tones; that’s an aspect that Labyrinthine man JL might consider playing up on future recordings. If JL were so minded also, he could probably work the atmosphere more into something really thick, unhealthy and decaying, though with this kind of doomy sludge metal, this might involve sacrificing energy and zest. Personally I’d like a bit more BM, faster and more aggressive, and a bit more raw in sound, worked into the music to give it more power, aggression and push.

Using Zdislaw Beksinski artwork reproductions for the cover artwork and with a logo designed by Christophe Szpajdel, well-known in the metal underground for such work, Labyrinthine has already preset the co-ordinates to become King of the One-Man BM Band Universe; now all that’s needed is a label to launch him on his way there!

Contact: Aquarius Records, Labyrinthine