ALBUM REVIEW: Wit’s End – Mizmor

Portland, Oregon’s premium purveyor of bleak, oppressive and suffocating blackened doom MIZMOR ( מזמור, the Hebrew word meaning “psalm”) has finally released new music, three years on from 2019’s acclaimed Cairn. The project is the musical alter-ego of multi-instrumentalist Liam Neighbours, also known as A.L.N, who has described Wit’s End as: “an ode to all those who adopt superstitious and grandiose beliefs about mankind, its “spirit,” and its place within the cosmos”. A weighty concept indeed for a mere half hour of music, but given the project’s unbelievable ability to convey mood and atmosphere through its music, will this be the latest in a sequence of excellent output, or will the well finally have run dry?

Opener and title track Wit’s End begins in a characteristically gloomy fashion, with a clean chord progression and a spoken word segment deploring the state of the modern world, before grating feedback comes spilling in like foul miasma. This intensifies the cloying atmosphere and hints at the true bitterness of A.L.N’s inner feelings. What follows is a lurching chord progression in a similar vein to some of Yodh‘s most sluggish and crushing moments, a monolith of roared laments and abject misery. This already feels like an entirely different beast to what has come before, gone are the phosphorescent flashes of black metal vitriol, replaced only by caustic, tormented doom. This builds throughout the track’s ample runtime to a juddering climax before slowly melting away into the sonic melancholy from whence it came.

Turning to the back half of the diptych, we find Pareidolia, an undulating dirge of hellishly distorted yet captivating sound. Contained herein are smudges of what sounds like utterly transcendent melody reminiscent of traditional hymns, but misshapen and grainy, like a worn-out video cassette bearing half-memories. It becomes constantly more intense, with sharp streaks of electrical distortion and wispish fragments of malformed speech becoming ever more apparent, tilting the music towards being downright unsettling, yet an odd feeling of catharsis still remains. This isn’t harsh noise by any stretch, but neither is it conventional electronic work. By its end it presents an oddly pleasant experience, unusually and uncharacteristically warm and hopeful compared to the band’s earlier material, offering a momentary (well, 15-minute…) glimpse that everything may, in fact, despite everything, work out alright in the end.

Overall, Wit’s End paints a vibrant image of an artist coming into his own. It is a mature and engaging record of two halves, combining brutish simplicity with a more subtle approach of haunting layers, both of which do an excellent job of voicing A.L.N’s discontent with the current state of the world while also suggesting that it is not entirely beyond saving. While Wit’s End may not flaunt the ruinous black metal that may have drawn some to MIZMOR in the first place, the particularly crushing style of bleak and cavernous doom it provides is likely not to disappoint anyone who picks this record up.

Rating: 8/10

Wit’s End is out now via Gilead Media.

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