Shatraug does not make ‘happy music’. Not content with his work in Horna/Sargeist, Mortualia is an outlet for some of the most icily grim black metal to have been unleashed outside of a Gallhammer album. Discordant, yet strangely melodic; razor sharp yet eerily hypnotic and boasting a vocal performance that is distressingly fascinating, this is the point where black metal and doom coalesce into one terrifying entity offering up a grimly nihilistic view of the world from behind a scree of powerfully monotonous distortion.
Opening with the gruelling ‘the blue silence’, it is clear from the outset that this is not to be an easy album. The music comprises an unnervingly melodic guitar line hidden under huge swathes of distortion and pinned to mid-tempo, crashing black metal drums. The vocals, however, are key and they are some of the most harrowing, soul-draining screams ever recorded to tape. Seemingly torn from the very depths of despair, there is a wordless horror embedded into every tortured shriek, so much so that it becomes almost too painful to listen to on occasions except that the music keeps drawing you back, as enticing as a flickering flame to a moth and just as deadly. At sixteen minutes, it is not a short piece of work, but as the guitars pile up over one another and the layers slowly expand outwards it’s clear that this is the sort of music that repays careful listening and patience in order to eke out the nuances embedded deep within its jittery, treble-laden framework. The second track, ‘in bleak loneliness’ is even less of an adherent to the principles of melody with the guitar detuned and ringing out beneath wave after wave of screams and the drums rarely varying from their hypnotically austere arrangements. Like gazing out of the window to witness only falling snow and never-ending grey skies looming over a mass of jumbled concrete, it’s an enervating experience that seeks to suck the very life and spirit from your body leaving you limp and drained from the experience. It is, in its own unique way, quite brilliant, but utterly uncommercial, which only goes to emphasise the dark passions that exist behind the making of such music; and for the few that do live in anticipation of such darkly atmospheric music this will prove to be a highlight (or should that be a low point?) of their gloomy calendar.
Having blackened your horizons with the opening gambit, ‘cold and grey’ does little to lighten the excessively sombre mood and the title says more or less everything you need to know about the wintery appeal of the track in question – rapier thin guitars conjuring up an air of frostbite and semi-formed words hanging in the frozen air. However, as the track progresses and the riffs become ever slower there is a real air of menace and forboding that seeps into the mix adding even greater depth to the already interesting compositions. ‘Devoid of warmth’, exists in a hurricane of guitars, developing an almost post-rock feel to the composition with subtle melodies creeping out from between the sheets of distortion and forming an air of utter despair. It’s actually rather beautiful, while at the same time crushingly sad, and evocatively haunting while the vocals offer no quarter at all, still sounding like the entreaties of the dying and the damned. ‘Forgotten soul’ edges out the aforementioned vestiges of tunefulness to round out the album on a droning, unsettling note that takes the listener into hitherto unsuspected depths of obsidian blackness. Quite easily the most morose of the tracks on offer (a mere five not including the bonus track) it closes the album on a suitably cataclysmic note with the listener liable to be listless and unresponsive for the remainder of the day to the extent that Mortualia should possibly carry some sort of health warning.
This self-titled release is a quite astonishing piece of work. It will certainly not appeal to many readers because of the utterly impenetrable, bleak nature of the music on offer. Moreover, in the areas where the music does edge towards the bearable there are the utterly unforgiving vocals which truly create an atmosphere of outright menace. That said, for the few doom-mongering individuals who do err towards the bleaker side of existence, this album offers up huge rewards. Amidst the sorrow there is beauty and amidst the waves of white noise and distortion there are melodies that seep into the consciousness even as the vocals and drums cascade down upon you. If you are willing (and able) to undertake the trip, this is a harrowing, mesmerising journey into one man’s heart of darkness and it is quite remarkable.
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