ALBUM REVIEW: Crepuscular Dirge For The Blessed Ones – Cosmic Putrefaction
When picturing the beautiful city of Milan, Italy, you probably imagine fashionable and overwhelmingly attractive people drinking espressos, talking extremely quickly and riding around on Vespas. What you may not expect to appear from this eternally fabulous city is cerebral yet ferocious, riff-laden death metal obsessed with the apocalyptic annihilation of a dying planet. Here to change that very perception is COSMIC PUTREFACTION, the musical alter-ego of Italian multi-instrumentalist Gabriele Gramaglia, who has previously helmed THE CLEARING PATH and contributed to TURRIS EBURNEA and VERTEBRA ATLANTIS. He has now released his sophomore effort Crepuscular Dirge For The Blessed Ones.
The album opens with …Through Withered Horizons, a suitably bleak recording of what sounds like the husk of a dead planet being remorselessly battered by solar winds. Feedback then builds up into a slabby chain of power chords overlaid with gurgling vocals. Sol’s Upheaval Debris is death metal with brains. Pummelling rhythm work laced with esoteric sounding riffs form the backbone of this megalithic structure, while barked vocals and cosmically-shaded solos decorate it with utterly alien atmosphere.
From Resounding Silence To The Obsidian Womb comes in with all the force of an eldritch abomination trying to tear its way through the fabric of our reality. It steps up the mind-bending aggression and urgency of what precedes it, but also trades it out at points for powerful, dirge-like interludes of monolithic power chords, leading to an incredibly fun and ethereal offering. Not content to rest on his laurels, Gramaglia then proceeds to put the hammer down with Amniotic Bewilderment. Thoroughly battering, he minimises (but does not leave out) the cerebral formula of his material in favour of a good old-fashioned skullcracker. Blastbeats, barbed-wire riffs and swirls of fiendish melody, oh my!
Boasting possibly the best title on the album, Lysergic Sulfuric Water is both as trippy and caustic as its name may suggest. Here we find crushingly heavy riffs and a tremendous performance being knocked out from behind the drum kit, with tasteful flashes of synth being blasted out like pulses from a quasar in the deep nothingness of space. While its predecessor may have boasted the best title, Twisting Spires In The Murk definitely has the most fitting. What we find here are twisting spires of subtle melody half-drowned in the murk of cyclopean riffs and punishing rhythm. Tremendous.
Cradle Wrecked, Curtains Unfurled is the COSMIC PUTREFACTION showroom. Everything discussed earlier can be found here in one easily digestible package. It opens on a fairly murderous riff, drops down into a pummelling mid-paced segment and then explodes into a terrific set of blastbeats. From there we have a tremendous show reel of riffs and time signatures that coalesce into a truly haunting segment overlaid with a sombre piano line. This is quite possibly the pick of the album.
The eponymous title track, Crepuscular Dirge For The Blessed Ones, begins with a swirling intro that can best be described as an auditory allegory for the cosmic loneliness we feel when we consider we may well be alone in the universe. Luckily, the tonic for that is riffs the size of planet-killer asteroids, which Gramaglia deigns to prescribe as a tonic for your ailing mind. When you just about can’t take any more, we return to that same intro, now repurposed, riding it out to the album’s conclusion.
Overall, while it is as stunningly verbose as one of Lovecraft’s more challenging tales, what we find on Crepuscular Dirge For The Blessed Ones is mind-shattering, cosmically charged death metal done almost completely without pretention or overcomplication and in a thoroughly satisfying manner, something which a good deal of Gramaglia’s contemporaries could do well to look over. Rest assured though, whether you’re a fan of death metal as unforgiving as the event horizon of a black hole or just looking for some violently forced consciousness expansion, you’ll not only find both here, but also have a whale of a time exploring it.
Rating: 8/10
Crepuscular Dirge For The Blessed Ones is out now via Profound Lore Records.
Like COSMIC PUTREFACTION on Facebook.