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DWELLNOUGHT "Monolith of Ephemerality"
DWELLNOUGHT "Monolith of Ephemerality"
By Dr. Abner Mality
Better pack your bags for a long, bleak trip, courtesy of this Italian band. This is not for casual headbanging or breezily bombing down the highway. Rather, it seems like a guided tour of either Hades or maybe a post-apocalyptic city.
How best to describe DWELLNOUGHT's all-engulfing sound? A grimmer version of UFOMAMMUT copulating violently with leprous British death metal ala GRAVE MIASMA or CRUCIAMENTUM, topped off with ambient industrial weirdness. Yes, it's that jovial. We have an almost 18 minute colossus paired with tracks running 9:46 and 10:48, respectively. That's the meat of the album, although there's an eerie organ intro "Slumbering Through The Dream of Impermanence" and a completely useless six minute plus outro "Beyond the Mind" that is basically the sound of atomic explosions looped endlessly while a robot mutters in the background.
The longest cut "The Final Desire Is Unbeing" is the doomiest and the most like UFOMAMMUT and such bands. Yet the sound is oddly hazy and not as "crushing" as it could be (or should be). Despite that, it's a fascinating piece of meditative heaviness that slips from riff to riff...more interesting than I thought it would be.
The laboriously titled "Crystallized Flesh Identities Condensed Into Wombs of Matter" shocks by blasting away with raging death metal that combines both the cavernous and dissonant sides of the art. There's still some slower moments and the track ends with prolonged ambience featuring some guy babbling in Italian. I suspect it's some sort of profound insight, but could be a fruit salad recipe for all I know. "Ill Whispers" is another 10 minutes plus of gloomy, repulsive death peppered with ambient bits, leading into "Beyond The Mind", which should have been excised from the record completely.
A strange and bleak journey from DWELLNOUGHT, not without its grim fascination, but certainly only for those who like the most downbeat and uncommercial metal.
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