ALBUM REVIEW: As I Cast Ruin Upon The Lens That Reveals My Every Flaw – Cavernlight

Just in case you were enjoying the sunshine a little too much, CAVERNLIGHT are here to remind us that we live in a world of doom, gloom and darkness. The Wisconsin-based sludgy post/doom metallers’ second full-length album is just about as bleak as it comes. For starters, it’s called As I Cast Ruin Upon The Lens That Reveals My Every Flaw – which is sick. It’s also heavier than death itself – like someone’s tied lead blocks to NEUROSIS’ feet and watched them sink. 

It feels fair to say that As I Cast Ruin… has been a while coming for CAVERNLIGHT. The follow-up to 2017’s similarly mouth-fillingly titled As We Cup Our Hands And Drink From The Stream Of Our Ache, this record delivers on much of the same weight that made its predecessor so compelling, while also pushing into new sonic and thematic territories. It’s a work of harrowing misery, and yet also occasionally of striking delicacy and even beauty. Take opener Accepting The Fate I’ve Crafted for example; this one absolutely brings the heaviness, but not before a lengthy intro of quietly gothic pianos and mournful clean vocals. It makes the inevitable eruption all the more devastating, with this dynamism remaining perhaps the defining feature of the record.

Also impressive is the time in which CAVERNLIGHT manage to achieve much of what they set out to do here. None of the tracks on As I Cast Ruin… are particularly long by doom or sludge standards, and yet all feel well realised and justified. It means the album moves along at quite a clip, which is all but essential in a genre that can so often drown in its own mire. The quality remains relatively steady too, although it does take something of an uptick around fourth track A Shimmering View. This one provides a fascinating change of pace, the band adopting a more glacial and less imposing tone to back a bleak spoken monologue in which one of their vocalists lays bare their struggles to engage and interact with the world.

Indeed, and as mentioned, the lyrics and themes of As I Cast Ruin… remain largely without light or hope throughout. On fifth track The Ashes Of Everything I’ve Failed To Be – another highlight that lands somewhere between the gothy thunder of PARADISE LOST and the dynamic anguish of AMENRA – the band speak of “every day enduring the inferno”, begging someone somewhere to “rend my soul” and “cast me asunder”. It’s grim, defeatist stuff, but the intention here isn’t solely to inflict misery; instead the band set out to encourage an acceptance of our place and pain in the world, something they do to particularly striking effect on the title track with lines like “I am warm here within this pool of filth” and “fault that lies behind me is now mine”.

Whether As I Cast Ruin… achieves the catharsis it aims for will no doubt be down to the individual listener. Some will probably just find it all a bit too bleak, but as the record reaches its staggering two-part conclusion in Prelude and To Reconcile A Virulent Life it’s hard not to feel quite moved by the sheer unflinching honesty of it all. This is hard, painful work, but give it the time and attention it asks for and you’ll find a record of considerable and arresting power.

Rating: 7/10

As I Cast Ruin Upon The Lens That Reveals My Every Flaw is set for release on May 13th via Translation Loss Records.

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