"Filth flarrin' flarrin' filth!" Eddie Murphy was channeling a repulsed Bill Cosby when he uttered those words on 1987's Raw, but he might as well have been talking about Encoffination, a funeral doom ensemble that dwells deep within their own miasma of blackened murk. Immersive yet suffocating, the claustrophobic production on O' Hell, Shine In Thy Whited Sepulchres adds a drone-like characteristic that is an instrument of its own.
Time doesn't matter when you're dead, and since mortality is Encoffination's one and only obsession, the eight tracks here feel stretched out – elongated into infinity – even though the album as a whole clocks in at a fairly restrained 40 minutes and never grows stale. The atemporal feel of it comes from the formlessness of the music, essentially a submerged wash of sustained chords reluctant even to keep pace with Elektrokutioner's leisurely percussion. This is funeral doom with a limp, which sounds dull on paper but there is a lot going here in spite of the ever languid pace. Stagnation is not an issue.
What Encoffination strive for first and foremost is mood, a transgressive, hallucinatory ambiance akin to a heroic dose of mushroom caps kicking in on your way across the River Styx, nightmare visions on the other shore just far enough away to defy visual clarity.
Both Elektrokutioner and Ghoat (all instruments other than percussion) are involved in a number of other evil sounding metal bands, none of which I'm personally familiar with, but I envision Encoffination as a distillation of all that's hateful and amoral about those other projects. Festered and Vomitchapel sound like they would be traditional death or gore grind bands, two genres that definitely find a spiritual kinship in Encoffination's blunted, pitched down doom; Winds of Old conjures images of atmospheric pagan drone and Father Befouled that of blackened, blasphemous death. These may or may not be correct guesses on my part as to what these bands sound like, but judging by the names alone there is a coherence to these two guys' mutual vision that is unlikely to find a better substrate to bind them together than the blighted morbidity of Encoffination.
Check out "Rites of Ceremonial Embalm'ment" below… this shit is just as much avant garde black metal slowed down to a lurching creep as it is true funeral doom. However you want to describe it, Encoffination's vibrations seep into the cracks of your synapses like a humid fog.
9 out of 10
O' Hell, Shine In Thy Whited Sepulchres is out Nov. 15th on Selfmadegod.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY2D9QTtGe4[/youtube]
