Desolate Shrine-The Sanctum of Human Darkness
By this point, Dark Descent has become a label that has well established itself as a flagship of darkly evocative and powerful underground black and death metal. The latest Desolate Shrine album, the Sanctum of Human Darkness, is no exception to this tradition, containing eight tracks of monolithic Finnish death metal that will not fail to have ground your bones to powdered ash at the end of a full sitting. A noticeable improvement over the unfulfilled potential of its predecessor, Tenebrous Towers, Desolate Shrine’s sophomore effort manages to collect the former album’s expansive, yet meandering atmospheric approach into a more focused attack, ultimately creating an album that leaves a greater impression due to the sheer momentum generated by the coupling of muscular riffwork and stark, obsidian atmosphere.
What is particularly impressive about The Sanctum of Human
Darkness was its inability to conjure comparisons to the usual troupe of
enfranchised death metal legends that every “old-school” revival act and their
5th cousin claims to be the inheritor of. While glimpses of regional Finnish patriarchs
Demigod and Convulse flashed by, coupled with a bombastic, infernal delivery
that more than slightly hinted at Immolation and Morbid Angel, and topped off
with a filthy layer of Incantation-esque soot, nowhere in the middle of
digesting the album was I ever given any inclination to pinpoint specific riffs
and passages to any entity other than the tormented muses of Desolate Shrine
themselves. In a death metal scene that
has in recent years filled with acts whose sole claim to note was to do a
particularly “legitimate,” undeviating rendition of an older template, it is
refreshing to find a band that, while clearly “old-school” in their approach to
the craft, interprets their influences in a way that accentuates their own
identity as opposed to subsuming it behind a revivalist banner.
While on a song to song basis, the album is hard to analyze,
as every track more or less meshes together into a single cacophony of
whirring, choking black miasma, the album never truly becomes tiresome due to
the monolithic relentlessness of its chaotic attack. Occasionally acoustic guitars and piano
pieces break the mayhem, acting as a somber eye-of-the-storm, a calm that becomes
all the more nerve-wracking knowing that the hurricane of guitar riffs and
nocturnal ambiances will inevitably return.
Yet even in its most violent moments, The Sanctum of Human Darkness
never loses its more morose tendencies, and as a whole there is a feeling of
tenderness and sorrow contrasted with your usual old-school sensibilities that
is more characteristic of Peaceville-style
melodic death/doom efforts, including early Katatonia, Paradise Lost, and more
contemporary acts such as Daylight Dies.
Don’t be fooled though, this is not an album that strives to
approach accessibility in any shape or form.
Almost nonexistent are the hooks and overarching melodies that serve to
anchor many other records to a backbone, and Desolate Shrine never seem to
settle down into comfortable, headbang-conducive groove. Instead, this opus works its way into the
mind of the listener through the layering of musical textures in a way tasteful
enough to paint evocative images of desolation and despair. At certain points, it almost feels as if you
are staring at the smoldering pillars of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where
the fragments of human civilization (analogous to the moments of extremely
human pathos that emerge through the aforementioned tenderness) stand as stark
supplicants to the majesty of destruction, heightening the sense of loss as you
ponder the futility of humanity in its struggle against the forces of
inevitable entropy. Indeed, the greatest
strength of The Sanctum of Human Darkness is, more than anything, as a holistic
work working through a wall of slightly-melodic ambiance to generate its
desired effect. The songs themselves
serve as individual variations of a shared theme, as opposed to distinct
entities with their own artistic identity.
However, the album truly comes together when listened to in one sitting,
taking the listener through an entire obsidian mountain range of emotional peaks
and valleys.
The Sanctum of Human Darkness’s role as atmospheric,
impressionist music ultimately fails to place it in the upper echelon of death
metal albums, as its ambitious yet monotonous approach towards composition
renders its movements largely devoid of individual standout moments. The band mostly plods along heavily at the
same tempo throughout the album, reinforcing the idea of The Sanctum of Human
Darkness as more of a deliberate, unmovable hellforged machine than a musical
album, and unfortunately the album eventually begins running out of steam to propel it forward in any
attention-grabbing manner. However, when
all is said and done, you could do far worse than to give this unique, yet
wholly traditional piece of death metal a spin or two in your passing
hours.
Rating: 7.5/10
