Assumption – Absconditus
Band: Assumption
Title: Absconditus
Label: Everlasting Spew Records
Release Date: 20 April 2018
Country: Italy
Format reviewed: CD-quality digital
Reddish sky, leaden, dense air. You look up and observe the last solar eclipse, like a titanic event. Catatonic. Your blood boils, but your consciousness begins to rise towards new vestiges of transfigurative calm. Assumption rises, from Italy, with its first full length, “Absconditus”, to create a vortex of dark matter Death/Doom highly hypnotic and atmospheric. Notably, the band (consisting of only two people, David and Giorgio) is responsible for invoking the ancestral spirits of diSEMBOWELMENT and Thergothon (Without reaching the exasperating slowness of the Funeral Doom) to create a captivating and excellently executed style exercise.
It is fair to say that Assumption takes elements of the aforementioned influences to cohere them in a style more linked to highly psychedelic dye aspects. In a way, something that had been glimpsed in his excellent EP of 2014, “The Three Appearances.” Very few current bands have managed to achieve this alchemy with the efficiency and dedication of this band. In only three long tracks (two of these exceed the 15 minutes of duration) we attend a cosmogonic mass of down-tuned riffs and deep, abysmal, gutturals that decant, parsimoniously, into sections of purely acidic and altering consciousness nature, although strangely mild-mannered. These moments of stillness remind me of a mixture of Pink Floyd with the heaviness of Esoteric. Really impressive.
They even risk introducing some flute arrangements in the second song of the album (“Resurgence”, the shortest track, which works as a separator between the other two, longer and totally epic), achieving an atmosphere of heartbreaking ethereal beauty. The excellent cover art, hand-painted by the artist Lauri Laaksonen, with a mix of ominous colors, can have some symbolic meaning too, which seems to me a perfect representation of the sound of this sonic wonder.
In this we observe a silhouette suspended in a sidereal vacuum, hanging from three beams of light, or metaphoric threads, which could be the pictorial interpretation of each of the tracks that make up “Absconditus”. Really, a very pleasant surprise of this 2018, by a young band, although very mature. An album that impresses by its solidity and varied sound palette, deliciously composed and recorded.
A delight for lovers of Death/Doom and psychedelic music. 9/10, Sergio
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9/10 Epic Storm
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