ALBUM REVIEW: Wearer Of Numerous Forms – Eremit

You can do a lot within two hours. Watch your favourite movie. Run all of your errands for the day. Almost finish The Library level on Halo: Combat Evolved. Or if you’re German doom merchants EREMIT, you can provide a nightmarish and brutish soundtrack to the deepest depths of hell. Following 2019’s Carrier Of Weight and 2021’s Bearer Of Many Names, Wearer Of Numerous Forms caps a trilogy that has seen the band establish themselves as a force of nature as they recount the tale of a central hermit character lost on an endless ocean.

Let’s get the salient point out of the way first: Wearer Of Numerous Forms clocks in at two hours and 11 minutes in just three tracks. That’s a lot. The first of those songs is the 63-minute behemoth Conflicting Aspects Of Reality, upon which EREMIT showcase their full arsenal. Opening with a wall of noise that encompasses the pace of hardcore, the brashness of industrial metal and the repetition of doom which is drawn out to drone scales, there is a lot to take in. After 17 punishing minutes of this, it all fades to nothing, like the ash of a snuffed out inferno being taken on the breeze. Over the course of the next 12 minutes, they painstakingly build up layers of mystery and leave cavernous spaces where evil lurks and malice simmers, before it all erupts in a cataclysmic new phase.

Across the next 20 minutes, they slow down to glacial tempos that would trouble the likes of ESOTERIC and TONER LOW. Their constraint and command is sublime and vocalist Moritz Fabian sounds utterly demonic throughout, his beast-felling roars and mountain-crumbling lows interspersed amongst the ruinous soundscapes. The band’s addition of trumpeter Hendrik ‘Brede’ Bredemann adds a level of discordance that toes the line of uncomfortable and grotesque; as droning notes blare out into the stormy surrounds, it elevates their work and their message – you feel like that lonely hermit lost to sea.

In the back half of the album (which is technically being peddled as a double album), we have the 21-minute Entombed and the 47-minute Passages Of Poor Light. While it would be reductive to say that they provide more of the same, suffice it to say that if you liked the first track, you’ll enjoy these two as well. Entombed leans more into a death-doom brutality, while Passages Of Poor Light is wickedly winding, culminating in a final impassioned slab of fast-paced riffage that packs more notes into five minutes than you’ve heard in the previous 45. It’s a smart bookend to Wearer Of Numerous Forms, as if to say that the beginning and end of life are violent and out of control, but the middle is a difficult and confusing road. Maybe we all are alone and lost in some small way, such is the nature of life.

With Wearer Of Numerous Forms, EREMIT do ask a lot of you as a listener. This is an album that requires patience, willingness, understanding, emotional connection and time. While many may balk at the runtime, you will find dark and dangerous treasures aplenty should you give this the time it deserves. This is a gargantuan achievement and sets a new bar for doom in 2023.

Rating: 9/10

Wearer Of Numerous Forms is out now via Drei Gleichen and Fucking Kill Records.

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