Labels: Alone (Spain)
Review by: Alex Deller
With it’s magnificent loping Matt Pike-style riff and slow, triumphant build, Geryon’s Throne sounds the kind of stuff that dreams are made of “” crushing yet elegant, a brooding, smoke-billowing funeral pyre that towers above all else around it and would be a feat of genius were its reign of terror not cut short by the vocalist’s wavering distorto-wail, a mournful, goetic lowing that clicks after a half-dozen listens but initially takes the edge off the crashing dirge preceding it. All of this then spirals out of control into skeins of feedback and directionless drone, creating a murky, limbonic state both confusing and oppressive. This lurking sense of paranoia is built upon with Arrodillate ante la Madera y la Piedra‘s atonal shiftings and frenzied off-time drumming, eventually punctured at around the five-minute mark by some enormous rending sounds that allow the vocals to spill out of whatever chasm they were trapped within, riding high over the cymbal crashes and swirling, fritzed-out ooze for the album’s most difficult listen. Oficio de Tinieblas allows time for a brief moment of comprehension, a gathering of the wits and senses before lurching into the churning hell of el Lamento del Carbon, a monstrous summoning of the spirits that creeps its way between an out-of-the-void, post-coma Ozzy and into a full-on doom rock gallop and back again, descending once more into a period of slow decay that closes Gran Poder on an even more ominous note than on which it began. Genius. Slightly flawed in its execution perhaps, but genius nonetheless.