People call funeral doom boring, and I get it. It’s very slow, often very long, not particularly technical, and contains few riffs per minute. Its compositions are not ordinarily gym-friendly, or headbangable. But good funeral doom is good. Crushing, transportive, and at times incredibly beautiful, as the low, slow and leaden is partnered with rising, floaty, ethereal melodies. Think Shape of Despair, Clouds, Esoteric. All this to say, that the best funeral doom is that which balances its punishing heaviness and crawling tempos with clean, graceful melodiousness in order to produce something truly immense. Blazar, Spanish funeral doom/sludge gang have a different philosophy. Cleaving closer to the ‘death’ in death-doom, and eschewing beauty and grace for menace and eerie synth-work, their debut LP Fatal Cosmic Wound aims for massiveness through pure grime. But will it end up vindicating the funeral doom naysayers?
About a month ago, Spectral Voice landed in my hands, and it was a reminder of the terrible, immersive oppressiveness that death doom and its variants can achieve. The proximity of this experience makes for a damning comparison when it comes to Blazar. Fatal Cosmic Wound maintains a gritty production, and an old-school style tone to the guitars, plus some creepy synths, reinforce the overall sludgy, ugly vibes. But despite its greater emphasis on being “mean,” in the surface-level sense, the album rarely comes across as truly heavy. Rather, the plodding tempos and barely-varying riffs melt together with those subtle background synths into anodyne stomping about as deep and dark as a puddle. There are times when Blazar approach that funereal transcendence of elephantine weight (see parts of “Beyond the Event Horizon,” and “Crystalised Oblivion”), but it doesn’t last.
One of the most promising aspects of Fatal Cosmic Wound is its propensity for spookiness. The album begins, ends, and is bisected by short synth instrumentals, and whilst they arguably don’t bring much to the whole, they are pretty unnerving. In fact, opener “Aether” instantly transported me back in time many years to a particular mystery adventure flash game I was once obsessed with,1 with warped, resonant notes and weird popping synth sounds. When Blazar weave these cleaner electronic elements into their grimy doom, it makes for some powerful and powerfully intriguing moments—such as the weird warbling of synth that bubbles up before combining with a strong, mournful refrain on “Crystallised Oblivion,” the pitch-shifting chords that accent the guitar before fading away for stripped-back plucking on the title track, and the unsettling presence of ebbing modular chords as “Forgotten” reaches its denouement. During these moments, and even during the interludes, I feel some of the feelings that the album was intended to invoke—fear, nausea, excitement And even though the synths could have been integrated better into the rest of the music, rather than mostly split between the instrumentals, there is promise and depth here.
The synths and these relatively immersive passages, however, make up but a fraction of Fatal Cosmic Wound’s total length. Though the album itself is a very reasonable—especially for doom—47 minutes long, it drags. This is so particularly in the first half, as, after “Aether” fades away, “Fatal Cosmic Wound” and ” Beyond the Event Horizon” play back-to-back, and they are unfortunately the longest and least dynamic of the four tracks proper. Great doom achieves magnificence through deceptive simplicity, layering and building anticipation to stunning apexes. But there is nothing deceptive about the simplicity here. Songs don’t build so much as maintain a level of density that remains monotone bar a few key changes or minor variations on the same riff pattern, and chord. It’s not jarring so much as frustrating, because while some excellent riff craft does arise from time to time, and while it’s very heavy, when sewn together, the tapestry is too bland to be compelling or oppressive.
If you’re looking to fill three-quarters of an hour with some nasty, downbeat noise, then Fatal Cosmic Wound might be for you, if you like it slow. Doom aficionados could go either way here, and love its grit enough not to be bothered by its uniformity, or be put off by its resolute unchangingness, and yearn for the depth it lacks. I have to say, I’m in the latter camp. For a genre that can reach truly abyssal profundities and cosmic heights, the album remains staunchly at sea level, despite its celestial title. Blazar still have much to prove.
Rating: Disappointing
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Carbonized Records
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: March 1st, 2024
