Nekus - Death Apophenia - LP

The German underworld lurkers of humongous subsonic death return with "Death Apophenia", a death-scarred sonic interment into absolute subterranean torment, and their most lightless and catacombal statement to date. The colossal sophomore full-length entombment expands on the putrid and crushing heaviness of its critically acclaimed predecessor “Sepulchral Divination”, taking the band's formula of droning sepulchral death doom to its most inevitable and horrendous triumph yet. With its forty-plus minute running time split up in just five pachydermic movements, "Death Apophenia" casts the listener down into an aphotic sunken abyss to be torn apart by immense tidal forces and crushed by catastrophic tectonic pressure. The band’s staple use of reverb to create immense, growling subterranean hallways reaches the pinnacle of its mastership, and so does their ability to construct humongously grotesque atmospheres that make the listener feel like they are being devoured by the earth and mummified alive. Tortured screams drenched in feedback and enormous and solemn sounding drum shells create a ritual-like telluric funeral march into the underworld, while slabs of inhumanly crushing and downtuned guitars bore a massive hole into the earth like molten lava melting the crust and sinking downward into the blackest chasm, evoking the sensation of an enormous, planet-sized horrendous burial taking place. Nothing can escape the sheer tonnage and crushing force of this immense sonic beast, and while Nekus are shown to be diligently delving further into the redefinition and delineation of their own personal idea of death metal as a monolithic and cinematic sentence to complete aural entombment, the comparisons to bands like Grave Upheaval, early Temple Nightside, Moss, Anatomia and The Funeral Orchestra, due to the surreal hideousness of the atmospheres and sheer heaviness of the music, will be many and not far from truth.