On the Olympia death/doom band’s unrelenting second album, everything sounds beefier. This music grabs you by the shoulders and shakes you to attention.
Mortiferum’s music exists in near-total darkness. The Olympia death/doom quartet builds labyrinths out of suffocating atmosphere, pounding drums, and churning squalls of detuned guitar. Only when your eyes adjust can you see an occasional sunbeam penetrating the gloom—a snaking, melodic lead or a clatter of cymbals that interrupts the slow march and sends the band into a headlong hurtle. Preserved in Torment, Mortiferum’s second album, is like one of Rothko’s Black-Form paintings. Its inky brushstrokes seem impenetrable at first, but entire universes lurk in the depths.
Mortiferum belong to a musical lineage that started in Finland in the early 1990s. The bands in that scene blurred the lines between death and doom metal with abandon, wringing deep emotions from elemental riffs and dragging stately melodies down into the catacombs. On Preserved in Torment, you can hear traces of the demented death metal of Rippikoulu and Demigod, as well as the more graceful strains of funeral doom acts like Thergothon and Skepticism. Mortiferum stick close to their influences, but what they lack in innovation they make up for in sheer heaviness. “We want it to sound murky and disgusting, and low and fucking gross,” vocalist and guitarist Max Bowman told Decibel earlier this year.
The murky and disgusting sound of Preserved in Torment is one of several areas where Mortiferum have improved on their debut album, 2019’s Disgorged From Psychotic Depths. The production on that record occasionally felt thin, like the mixing board was struggling to keep up with the seismic weight of the band’s playing. Everything is beefier on Preserved in Torment. You feel the rumble of the bass in the pit of your stomach, the punch of the multi-layered guitars in your chest. Even Bowman’s agonized vocals, though still mostly indecipherable, are brought forward in the mix. The denser sound helps emphasize the brutish physicality of the music. The feeling that the walls are closing in isn’t accidental; the band is pushing them in on you.
The melodic guitar passages that punctuate the oppressive atmosphere fit one of two profiles: aching, minor-key runs anchored in the fundamentals of doom; or frantic death metal solos that send the band off into wild paroxysms. Most songs include both. A little less than two minutes into opener “Eternal Procession,” a mournful lead edges out the main riff, underpinning a moaned vocal part. A minute later, it’s replaced by a frenzied, Incantation-style guitar solo. When the song returns to the crushing wall of riffs, it feels like it’s gone through a whole journey. Mortiferum deploy their biggest melodies sparingly, but when they do, it’s in service of elevating the drama. Considered along with their flawlessly executed tempo shifts—jumping from funeral doom crawl to midtempo lurch to breakneck gallop in the space of just a minute or two—it’s clear that the band strives to create songs with narrative arcs.
The first sound we hear when the needle hits wax on Preserved in Torment is a death growl, and the closing track, “Mephitis of Disease,” ends abruptly, almost mid-riff, as though we’ve dropped in on the band in medias res and there’s music at the periphery we don’t get to hear. Thoughtful choices like these help Preserved in Torment feel thrillingly present. Even the most competent atmospheric death/doom can sometimes fade into the background, but Mortiferum wants to grab you by the shoulders and shake you to attention.
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