By Monk
Established in 2019 by a multi-instrumentalist known only as Ash, Sepulchre By The Sea reflects one man’s ambition to create atmospheric black metal inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe and at the same time has grown into an increasingly ambitious studio project. Over the last five years, Ash has released an album ‘Conqueror Worm’, a six-track record spanning nearly an hour, crossing multiple sub genres along the and inspired by several of Poe’s best-known poems and tales, including ‘The Raven’ and ‘The Black Cat’. This was followed up with the 2021 ‘Ratiocinations’ EP, inspired by Poe’s famous detective stories, the first of their kind, and which continued to blur the lines between black metal, shoegaze, melodic death metal and hardcore.
After a three-year hiatus, and relocating to Cornwall, SBTS now returns with its protagonist’s most ambitious project to date, in the form of this second full length release. ‘Seven Chambers’ was conceived, written and recorded as one continuous 45 minute song inspired by Poe’s ‘The Masque Of The Red Death’. This was later divided into seven unique movements, each coded to the mood and colour of the chambers in the story.
Like the work from which it draws its inspiration, this a dark, dense, gothic journey through the allegorical re-imagining of Dante’s earlier vision of man’s descent to his inevitable destiny, each evoking its own atmosphere and ethos, from the ethereality of the initial ‘Blue Hubris’ and the subsequent immersion in a ‘Green Bath’ via the dank punishment of ‘Purple Pestilence’ and the truly seismic disturbances of ‘Orange Opulence’, which both pummels and seduces with its epic and stunningly timed turns.
The (somewhat belated) centrepiece of the album comes in the truly titanic, visceral and vitriolic ‘Violet Visions’, a 12-plus minute symphony of coruscate dissonance, harmonic noise that is cathartic yet cauterizing in equal measure, appellant yet repellent, which eloquently and energetically summarizes the author’s approach to twisting the coil of our sensibilities to their most resistant of limits without breaking both.
Such is the depth into which Ash delves into the story that anyone who preorders the album on Bandcamp will receive the bonus track ‘Darkness Holds Dominion’, a 21-minute spoken word performance of the story, set to an ambient drone soundscape…
- ‘Seven Chambers‘ is released tomorrow (Friday 2 August).
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