As I listened to this debut album by the French band Malemort I asked myself a question I’ve asked before — though to be clear, I haven’t heard many records in the league of this one: Why do our minds and emotions make such deep connections with music that’s so convincingly calamitous, so mercilessly stripped of hope, so sodden with misery and soaked in blood, so cataclysmically heavy, so frighteningly violent?

Perhaps it’s just the part of us that instinctively admires anything done with the meticulousness of a jeweler’s hand, even if it’s an efficiently organized demolition job. Maybe it’s because death looms over us all, the fear of extinction, the dread of all feeling and thought being snuffed out without warning, like a beautiful daughter torn to pieces in an instant by a machine rammed forward under the direction of a hate-filled lunatic… it’s always right there, hovering on the edges of daily life, and regulalry reminding us of its presence through some new tragedy.

I don’t know. I’m no psychologist. I only know what I feel, and for fuck’s sake I’ll just say it up front — this album is the most stunningly powerful, staggeringly horrific, blindingly apocalyptic doom album I’ve heard this year, and it has few peers in any year. Continue reading »