Epitaphe – II
Release Date: 11th April 2022
Label: Aesthetic Death (CD), Gurgling Gore (Cassette).
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Genre: Progressive Death Metal, Doom Metal.
FFO: Blood Incantation, Funeral.
Review By: Andy Spoon
Following up “I” (Roman numeral one), the French Progressive Death metal project Epitaphe seeks to bring a movement-based, holistic album that gives credence to Funeral Death as its primary influence, but seeks to expand its musical “footprint” on II.
1) Sycomore:
The album starts with an acoustic interlude with a drum backbeat that is reminiscent of flamenco music over something similar to Pink Floyd or King Crimson. Pads and clean electric guitar eventually join in to double-down on the Pink Floyd motif. If you think about this as a doom album, the pace and the chord structures make a good amount of sense as Epitaphe blends the Arabian-based flamenco chord structures with the heavy, rhythm-centric doom cadence that harkens back to blackened music in minor keys, just as flamenco often does. From a musical perspective, the two are largely from the same school of thought, making transitions between the two more contiguous and “flowy”.
2) Celestial:
The song starts with huge reverb over clean electric guitar in a gentle interlude before a giant-sounding blast beat-led wall of sound. Vocals come in for the first time almost 5 minutes into the album as a deep, melodic drone quite similar to Type O Negative, before going into deep death metal growls in the next sequence. The song dances between black metal, doom, and death metal in different parts, making for a complex listen. The drums are very raw, giving an unpolished sound to the whole tone as it transitions between movements.
After several measures of “traditional” death metal, the track transitions back to clean vocals, introducing another movement of post-death melodic elements with guitar leads and regular drum timing before the track ultimately breaks down at around the six-minute mark and enters into the next movement with a clean guitar interlude harkening slightly back to the flamenco-style introduction to the album. At around 08:15, Celestial explodes into thrash/death with low-register death riffs and aggressive fry vocals. Essentially, it’s an entirely new song, but part of the interludes and transitions of the same track, something that listeners could appreciate, as a movement, instead of a discreet single, lending itself to the progressive nature of the album.
After that sequence concludes, Epitaphe moves again, jumping between genres into blackened doom at around the 12:00 mark. The melodic and dramatic nature of this sequence is especially powerful as the drums and guitars haven’t changed mix presence, so it holds onto a distinct tonal quality that is unique to Epitaphe, regardless of the progressive changes in genre at each turn. This part of the song happens to be the most harrowing, giving the listener the most melodic substance of the song. Wails of post-death and blackened doom toss back and forth for a few minutes before crashing into a final interlude with just pads and delayed clean guitar over hall reverb before coming to a total close at over nineteen minutes.
3) Melancholia:
The beginning of Melancholia starts as a wailing death metal track with raging old school DM riffs at the bottom of the neck, thrashing back and forth over the same plate-reverb drums that are at full presence in the mix. The transition into the next phase, a blackened death, or post blackened interlude starts at around the 05:30 mark before dropping completely into the gentle interludes that seem to sandwich themselves between each distinct sub-track.
At around 08:00, the interlude takes a strange character as it comes back into that “Pink Floyd”-esque type of movement with clean vocals over ethereal pads and strings from the synth group, integrating what sounds like a synth saxophone at one point. It certainly breaks up the metal elements of the song, but it misses in some ways as it largely seems more hollow or flat than necessary, taking from the continuity. Frankly, I was quite ready for it to transition back to the metal, which it does at around 10:30 into more of a doom-y or post-doom segment. The synth and guitars mesh much better with the drums as they are mixed during the heavier segments, something that I wish they would have deviated slightly from during the last interlude. Nevertheless, the track has a very “live” feel with its lack of dynamic change in the mix, almost like something you’d hear at a real venue.
The track continues as a doom song, ultimately slowing down to a slug’s pace in it’s “doomiest” moment thus far. The last segment of the track keeps slowing and slowing to have the effect that the pace of the song is weakening, or at least breaking down harder. I found it to be the former, personally. At long last, a final transition of pads concludes the song into white noise.
4) Insignificant:
Insignificant starts, expectedly, with acoustic guitars and slow drums, just as in earlier tracks, with a slow pattern that adds dissonant suspended chords to introduce the “slightly wrong” element that signifies a change in melody is coming, as the minor key interlude doesn’t want to resolve here. At the 03:15 mark, deep, heavy, guitar grooves jump in with chunky breakdown energy as the track transitions into its weighty, sludgy form in the next segment. As far as doom metal parts of the album goes, I found this one to be the most enjoyable, as it seemed to have felt to possess more melodic substance to it, more angst and “feeling”, so to say.
At around 09:00, the track hits a hard 90-degrees, going into fast-tempo old-school death metal once again for a very “Blood Incantation” sound, something that this band could easily make an entire album of with little complaint. Insignificant brilliantly starts its next segment with a gorgeous stereophonic mix of the right and left side of the drum kit leading a heady, reverb-laden post-metal interlude that is both melodic and heavy, maybe one of the better melodic parts of the album thus far. Finally, the mix, burdened by reverb, washes out into a heavy, tonally-chaotic noise interlude as the track comes to a close.
5) Merging With Nothingness:
A final musical interlude with acoustic guitar wraps up the album in the same way that the album started, closing out the production as a whole on the same energy that it started as, drifting lightly into its final resolve.
Impressions:
I found the album to be extremely listenable as the interludes keep things from getting boring. The movements between each track manage to keep the “noise” level up so that the listener is not lulled to sleep, nor overwhelmed. As there are only 4 named tracks on the album, it ought to be stated that there are closer to 12 or 13, including the micro-tracks that make up each 15-minute movement. It’s largely meant to be interpreted as a series of 4 or 5 distinct parts, or segments, each having a death metal, doom, and post-metal parts with musical interludes to separate them from one another.
There is a good amount of continuity in the non-continuity, specifically that the tracks feature the same dynamic structure, same mixing, and same overall musical thematic direction. Other than that, it feels almost like 3 to 4 EPs all squished together into one album that manages to be cohesive. However, I find that there are some small parts that could have been reigned-in more, such as the mix and master on certain parts and the choppy transition into the clean vocal sections. Epitaphe makes a highly-listenable album that offers the listener something that is worth several listens, even one after the other. II is probably a great example of a wide array of extreme metal offered in one sitting, often showing where the genres cross over to achieve the same narrative goal.
(4 / 5)
