(written by Islander)
“Punishing in its heaviness, violently deranged in its fretwork, hopeless in its moods, and vocally horrendous, the song takes listeners to a nightmarish place, and freezes us in place while it completes its looming edifice of terror and awe.”
That’s how we summed up the title song to a new EP by the Prague-based blackened death/doom metal band Můra when we premiered it earlier this month. Today we premiere the EP in its entirety, in advance of its release on January 20th by Doomentia Records and Caligari Records. Like the title song, it is a very heavy and relentlessly harrowing experience.
The EP includes three tracks. It begins with that title song and continues through “Abysmal Putrefaction” and “Cascades of Skulls.” As those song titles portend, death and disaster reign in the music, and are worshiped.
As we wrote previously about the title track, “Needle Cathedral” begins mangling the listener’s mind immediately with a storm of abrasive electronics — a collage of static-shrouded gouging sounds and shrill needling tones that seem to stand as a warning of impending ruin. It sounds like war and agony.
From there Můra discharge writhing swarms of frenzied but cruel riffage, steady gunshot beats that anchor a hellish march, and a tandem of monstrous roars and deranged screams which echo as if expelled within the needle cathedral of the song’s name.
In the low end, the band heave and pound but also create feverish throbs, interspersed with hard-slugging grooves, ritualistic percussive rumbling, and bursts of boiling fretwork spasms. Although the frenzied string tortures, horrifying bellows, and terrorizing screams never completely vanish, a mood of soul-sucking dread and oppressiveness slowly oozes to the surface as the momentum lurches forward.
The band also rhythmically jolt the listener’s spine, as a prelude to a paroxysm of maniacal chords, hammering blast-beats, and berserk screams. The abrasive, roiling and writhing, riffage re-surfaces, and by now seems to be a channel of mind-ruining pain that swarms around brutish blows and terrorizing throat-work.
When “Abysmal Putrefaction” takes its turn, it’s as if a ceremony in celebration of death has reached its second stage, and listeners remain lashed in place to witness it, like sacrificial offerings.
This one has a rocking gait, enormous low-frequency thrusts, and riffs that slash and churn. Its mood is both hideously imperious and almost jubilantly cruel. But when the vigor of the beats switches into a lumbering stomp, the music seems to moan and wail as the filth-coated melodies portray misery, and then things become violent again, with drums hammering, the corrosive guitars roiling and seeming to cry out in desperation, and those inhuman vocals roaring, screaming, and growling in strangled tones.
As the band cycle through the phases of the song again, they reinforce both the macabre catchiness of the music and the dynamism of Můra‘s songwriting proclivities.
And then the listener falls before the “Cascade of Skulls,” the final stage in this deathly ritual. The drums do boom like the accompaniment to a ritual, and the chords sound massive, again anchored by humongous bass movements, but of course the riffage also sizzles and seethes, creating the presence of hungering malice.
With a frantic and attention-seizing guitar-bridge, Můra surge into a battering and furiously pulsating assault, interspersed with haughty fanfares of malignant glory, as if to portray a terrible tyrant presiding over an orgy of madness.
But Můra also slow down, again seeming to channel the utter wretchedness and hopelessness of death’s victims, and they round off the ceremony with a closing dose of mind-mutilating electronics and berserk screams.
It turns out that the words with which we began this premiere, which were intended to describe the EP’s title song, apply to the EP as a whole. It is an unearthly experience of musical terror and torment, of crushing oppressiveness and malicious lunacy, of blood-freezing dread and the ruthless extinction of hope.
It’s safe to say that no one outside the realms of extreme metal would understand the awful attractions of this kind of bleak and frightening music, or appreciate the skill with which Můra have rendered their audio nightmares. But we do, and hope you will too.
MŮRA is:
M. – vocals
H. – guitars
L. – guitars
N. – bass
J. – drums (guest)
Needle Cathedral will be released on January 20th by Doomentia Records on LP vinyl and cassette tape, and by Caligari Records on cassette tape in the U.S.
The EP was recorded and mastered by Amak Golden in Golden HIVE Studio, and it was mixed by Jakub Školný in Studio ŠUMM. The fantastic cover art is the work of Belial NecroArts. For more info about the album and the band, see the links below.
We also note that Můra will perform an album release ceremony with Pale Spektre on the 22nd of February in a baroque church in Prague. Details about that event can be found HERE.
MŮRA:
https://muradoom.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/Muradoom
https://www.instagram.com/muradoomband/
DOOMENTIA:
https://www.doomentia.com/
https://doomentiarecords.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/doomentia
https://www.instagram.com/doomentiarecords/
CALIGARI:
https://caligarirecords.storenvy.com/
https://caligarirecords.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/CaligariRecords
https://www.instagram.com/caligarirecords/