Album Review: Ordo Serpentis – This Shrine of Despair
Artist: Ordo Serpentis
Title: This Shrine of Despair
Label: Noctivagant Collective
Release date: August 7th, 2025
Country: Greece & USA
Format reviewed: High-quality digital recording
Album Review: Ordo Serpentis – This Shrine of Despair via Noctivagant Collective by Pegah
Ordo Serpentis, the duo of The Black Monolith and Shane Beck (The Last American Poet), return with “This Shrine of Despair”—an uncompromising descent into shadows of faith, hypocrisy, and the collapse of blind devotion. The album’s title suggests despair itself elevated into something sacred, a shrine built from ruin rather than salvation. The cover art reflects this paradox: Rendered in black and yellow contrasts, it evokes caution, evil, and darkness. At its center is a haloed figure in black, who suggests sanctity or holiness, but the artwork doesn’t present him as radiant or divine—rather, there’s a darkness in his expression, almost weary and suspicious, mirroring the album’s lyrical themes.
The journey begins with “Levels of Decompression”, a low-frequency soundscape that feels like an ascent into thinning air—less compression, fewer sounds, more unease. Shane Beck’s spoken narration here feels unlike anything he has delivered before, adding new dimensions of darkness to the piece. “The Old Magick” continues in a similarly subdued register, its distorted textures intensifying the drama as if completing the arc of the opening track.
“Black Eyed Beast” enters deceptively calm, but grows increasingly hostile as harsh sounds intrude and transform the atmosphere into something intimidating. Beck’s voice shifts into distortion, becoming monstrous and fearful—as though channeling the beast within, straining to break the chains of oppression and end the endless cycle of belief. The bleakest moment comes with “Spoiled Remains of a Dead God”, where ritualistic sounds build into the sense of a ceremony for summoning something long buried, a grim liturgy for a god that no longer answers.
The title track “This Shrine of Despair” expands into something more dynamic and even cinematic. Its spoken-word passages distill the album’s central theme into poetry:
Hear the empty prayers of the hypocrite that pretends to believe
Oppressed by the dead echoes of this catholic dream which is a lie.
In bitterness of the words wasted while they kneel, beg & cry
This Shrine of Despair, religious icons of a cross where they hang to die.
At this point, the album turns toward transformation. “Breath of the Demon” keeps the soundscape dynamic, as if announcing a change is on the horizon—the birth of a demon long forgotten, or perhaps a new force rising from beneath the ashes of faith. The closure, “Fate of the Dagger”,returns to the sparse atmosphere of the beginning. The dagger becomes a potent symbol: of courage, divine communication, supernatural power, and the precarious line between destruction and transcendence. Its low-compression soundscape feels like a circle completing itself, carrying the listener back to where the journey began, though altered by what has been revealed along the way. 8.5 / 10
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8.5/10 To Greatness and Glory!
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