KRAKEN DUUMVIRATE: The Stars Below, The Seas Above (DOOM): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

While we thought he had disappeared, swallowed up in the icy water of one of the thousand lakes of the country that saw his birth, Kraken Duumvirate finally comes back from limbo with this first album that we no longer hoped for. The most relentless fans of the Doom may remember "From The Dying Soil To The Eternal Sea" and even more "The Astroglyphs Of The Ritual Of Deluge", two EPs released between 2008 and 2011, offering a mix between Tyranny and Aarni, the first one for its cyclopean darkness, the second one for its experimental character.

So we left it at that with a duo that still hasn't given the keys to resolve the mystery of its identity. In these two souls, who call themselves Magus Polypus Apollyon III and Grand Architeuthis S. Dux, everything is a question of opacity. Opacity of the origins of which we know nothing. Opacity of a music which has finally no Doom other than the label, so much the slowness deployed confines more to hypnotic trance than to a tempo listened to in slow motion. Opacity also of compositions that have still not retained the principle of having precise features, a well-defined form but on the contrary, they are real bathyscaphes sinking into the depths of vertiginous sea pits. These tracks with blurred contours, sheltering cavernous vocals, electronic emanations, ghostly percussions and slender guitars determine an art that is still as enigmatic as ever, impervious to all the criteria usually applied when approaching an album.

Faithful to a concept linked to underwater abysses, we would like to affirm that "The Stars Below, The Seas Above" proves to be more accessible than its predecessors. It is, but in its own way, abyssal, necessarily abyssal. Let's acknowledge that some titles are not lacking in a form of beauty, distant, opaque (always), strange, like 'Star Spawn' whose chords never go straight but release haunting ocean sprays. In the same way, 'The Temple' has a moving melancholy, yet slashed by sounds spattered from a cave nestled in the depths of the sea.

But like beacons littering this spectral Way of the Cross, there are all these instrumental interludes which, far from serving as buoys, plunge us by their ambient and electro finery into these disturbing sea beds. And what about 'Queen, Arise', a terminal backwash that lasts almost fifteen minutes and is so catatonic that the drummer has time to go pee between two snare drum strokes. This suffocating track sums up in itself what Kraken Duumvirate is, the explorer of an unspeakable funeral doom nested with mystery, shining almost with cosmic gleams and capable of plunging our lives into an endless night, that of these sea bottoms that the sunlight cannot reach.

In spite of these long years of absence, the Finns have not changed and offer the album that their first aquatic nightmares let us hope for, temple of an arid and black Doom that reminds us that the genre is decidedly not a question of reason but of faith and feeling. - Official website

KRAKEN DUUMVIRATE

THE STARS BELOW, THE SEAS ABOVE

AUTRE LABEL

DOOM