By Monk
There are times when I feel like a vampire. I mean, I work night shifts. Especially in the depths of winter, I go to work in the dark and come home in the same gloom. I sleep through what little sunshine we enjoy at this time of year. At times, I forget what sunshine actually looks like. So, it could be argued that this album from Italian gothic death metallers Drown In Sulphur could be part of the soundtrack of my daily (or maybe that should be nightly) life and my journey through it…
Fluidly combining the innate beatdown brutality of modern deathcore with the more subtly bone-chilling aspects of ’90s black metal atmosphericss, this is a collection of nine violent and melodic dark songs designed to introduce the listener to an esoteric experience, touching the deepest and most controversial aspects of the human soul, taking us on an introspective journey in search of man’s spiritual elevation, using the image of the “vampire communion”, primarily inspired by the wave of similarly generic books and movies which proliferated in the Eighties and Nineties.
Treading a fine line between the generic miens and tropes mentioned above, ‘Dark Secrets…’ is an album that lives up to its name and promise, dark and dense yet rewarding and strangely enervating, one moment vibrant and enriching, the next densely introspective and clautrophiobic. The latter is a sense evoked right from the off with the intro of ‘Adveniat Regnum Tuum’, which evokes the sound of a vampire within his coffin listening intently to what is going on in an outside world ignorant of his presence, while at the same inspiring that sense of egoistic exploration which gives the album its overall lyrical thematic.
While, as I said above, ‘Dark Secrets…’ doesn’t stray too far from the archetypal blackened DM tropes. it possesses an easy fluidity which takes you on a natural progression through our mutual journey into its darkest recesses, and is an offering more than worthy of being explored by any fan of the mien.
- ‘Dark Secrets Of The Soul’ is released on Friday (12 January).
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