VERDUN: Astral Sabbath (DOOM): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

In spite of its name, Verdun doesn't draw its inspiration from the First World War but develops a personal story, that of Admiral Masuka, in a spatial concept that is declined on each album since the founder EP of 2012. Appearances are deceptive and it's not "Astral Sabbath", following the adventures narrated by "The Eternal Drift's Canticles" (2016), that will contradict us.

Those who, guided by this title with hints of cosmic doom, would not yet know the people of Montpellier and hope to be invited to a trip with the allure of hallucinated trips will be a little disappointed. A trip is in question here, but it is by no means comfortable. Verdun presents itself as the demiurge of a suffocating sludge, chiselled and dark as an oil slick. Which it is even more and more so.

If in the previous effort appeared at times some emotional gleams and a distant form of beauty, this second long-lasting album sinks body and soul (above all) into a bottomless abyss where no light shines. Or so little, witness this 'Venom(s)' whose melancholic pulse makes it more dramatic than angry. That the screamer David Sadok is back after a short hiatus and that Jérôme Pinelli is now the only guitarist after the departures of Paulo Rui and Aurélien Dumont is probably not foreign to the chaotic darkness that eats away at "Astral Sabbath" and tends to bring it a bit closer to "The Cosmic Escape Of Admiral Masuka".

If the band doesn't part with these stretched out compositions, they growl with a collected force, all of them protruding in underground tension carrying a viscous despair. Their defloration proves to be quite harsh, especially since 'Return Of The Space Martyr' immediately sets the tone of an album cast in the most petrified concrete. Nine minutes as suffocating as they are exhausting. Yet, after this icy cruelty, the rest of the menu turns out to be more complex between a 'Darkness Has Called My Name' whose sinuous (cross) path is paved with painfully melancholic tears or a vicious 'The Second Sun', whose quiet beginnings hide finaly a nauseous ebb that stretches in a cloudy and unhealthy spreading. Ultra heavy and irrigated by a guitar soaked in rust, 'L'enfant Nouveau' then the terminal 'Ästräl Säbbäth', which sounds like an endless and definitive procession in the bowels of a nihilistic darkness, confirm in their turn the tortuous character of an opus whose brutal gravity hides in fact a maze of atmospheres.

Under the features of a sludge doom, "Astral Sabbath" teems with a creeping force and a dark richness nestled in the dark folds of its intimacy. - Official website

VERDUN

ASTRAL SABBATH

DEADLIGHT

DOOM