Mellow and humble greetings, doomers and gloomers! We’re having a bit of a different flavor here on Funeral Doom Friday today. Sometimes we all need to freebase some sludge. We need something grimy and caked with the foulest filth. Something that’s steeped way too long in its own putrid exctreta. And I mean that in the best possible way.
Cerbère
Life’s been quite sludgy and murky for a while, yeah? It at least ought to have a soundtrack! Paris, France’s Cerbère have stepped up to that task!
Cerbère are Baptiste Pozzi (guitars & vocals), Baptiste Reig (drums) and Thom Dezelus (bass). Pozzi barks from behind the microphone. His vocals sound cancerous, as though he warmed up by swallowing a fire poker. Dezelus’ bass tone rumbles most robustly alongside Reig’s acerbic percussion.
All 3 tracks on Cerbère’s EP are worth the listener’s while. But for our purposes here at Funeral Doom Friday, we’re focusing on the eponymous final track. It’s a 15-minute monster of a song. Like its namesake (“Cerberus”) it brays and howls along the abyssal plains of the underworld. Any rogue souls attempting escape will perish down its gullet.
Body Void
Body Void will unleash their new album Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth on April 21. They’ve debuted the opening number, “Wound.” 13 minutes of truncheon blows to the base of the cranium. It’s like scratching at a festering sore, refusing to let it heal. Or, think of popping off a scab with a screwdriver. Some bands make music dedicated to self-improvement. Not Body Void. Theirs provides a soundscape for self-immolation.
Bury Me Beneath This Rotting Earth features noise contributions from Entresol. Entresol’s auditory assaults make the song feel like an intercepted radio transmission from a nether dimension. In a language no human tongue can utter. Body Void aren’t afraid to let loose some black metal blasting in this acidic tune. But in the song’s chaotic denouement, Body Void brings hammer to bone, pelting us unrecognizable.
While you listen, take a few moments to contemplate Ibay Arifin Suradi’s cosmically stark artwork as well.