When I first encountered the debut song of Mexico City’s Reverence to Paroxysm, a long track called “Congruence of the Profound Forlorn” on their 2020 split with Spain’s Pestilength, I struggled to find words capable of expressing how horrifying the experience was. I’m not sure I succeeded, even in referencing “hallucinatory sensations of dread, degradation, and disease” and the reign of “unreasoning madness and fatal sickness”, or resorting to such phrases as “demented and doomed” and “mauling and mangling”.
More horrors were revealed when the band released a live album named Cadaveric Continuity of Unreal Perspectives last fall, providing a steep descent into a foul death metal netherworld where primal fears thrive and defenseless victims are bludgeoned, poisoned, and sliced with corroded blades into strips of bleeding meat by monstrosities of preternatural origin.
Well, you see, I’m still trying to find the right words, and the task becomes even more daunting because the band have built on what they’ve already accomplished (frightening as that prospect may be) by completing a debut studio album named Lux Morte. As a sign of how wickedly effective it is, the album has been picked up for release on August 31st by none other than Me Saco Un Ojo Records and Dark Descent Records.
As an even more viscerally effective sign, we’re premiering a song today named “Portals To Dark Misery“. More struggles with words to come….
The members of the band have learned their hideous talents well, through previous experience in such groups as Hacavitz, Profanator, Disgorge, Castelumbra, and Fumata. But technique is one thing. Putting your heads in a rotten and ruinous place for the purpose of composition is another. Presumably they didn’t resort to actual torture and human sacrifice to do that, but the question still lingers.
You certainly can’t accuse the band of false advertising when they named this song “Portals To Dark Misery“. It proceeds at first in a humongous and thoroughly oppressive stomp, deploying drums that feel like ruthless body blows, gruesomely distorted stringed instruments, and sewer-dwelling gutturals. The lead guitar moans as it slowly slithers along with its brutish brethren, oozing agony.
The beatings become more vigorous, the lead guitar begins quivering like maggots, and the band also earn their name with paroxysms of slaughtering violence — drums hammering, the riffage becoming a dense and devastating storm, and the lead guitar convulsing in the madness of despair. Those abyssal gurgling vocals are still deeper than ocean trenches and still horrifically macabre, and they elevate into blood-congealing howls.
Ruthlessly pulverizing and ugly as sin, the music pounds with such traumatizing force that you’ll feel like you’ve lost some inches of height by the end, and that queasy and quivering melody may cause gastrointestinal distress, or at least lead you to conclude that misery has found a very wretched voice.
Lux Morte will be released by Me Saco Un Ojo and Dark Descent on CD, vinyl, and digital formats.
Explore the options via the links below, and also check out the previously released album track “Necropacity“, which is massively destructive in both its thuggish pavement-splitting force and its maniacal frenzies, imperious in its cruelty, and ghastly in its sensations of affliction. At times it will also make you feel like you’ve been thrown onto the back of a galloping devil-steed with a screaming wraith for company.
PRE-ORDER:
https://mesacounojo.bandcamp.com/album/lux-morte
https://darkdescentrecords.bandcamp.com/album/lux-morte
REVERENCE TO PAROXYSM:
https://www.facebook.com/reverencetoparoxysm