Et Moriemur - _Ex Nihilo In Nihilum_
(Solitude Productions, 2014)
by: Chaim Drishner (7 out of 10)
If you want to listen to some mellow, elegant doom of the easy-listening kind, this album might be right up your alley. It's well crafted, it's atmospheric enough, and it is interestingly structured. You know the drill: overly romantic, thematically existential, having familiar melodies, long spoken parts, some growls, some violins, a piano and a dark ambient piece.

These Czechs are all over the place, running sideways like busy ants, painting this musical canvas and covering its entirety without leaving one single piece of cloth untouched by sonic paint as if being inflicted by a sudden sense of horror vacui -- Czech-style. Et Moriemur leap from funeral doom to gothic doom to neoclassical, through many other aesthetics that stand in the way of this massive freight train. The result is fascinating, because so many styles come rushing into the listener's ear in a given time unit, and yet, this band seem to muster any aesthetic they touch with high-class proficiency.

They are excellent in playing doom/death, funeral doom, gothic doom, the romantic shit and are familiar with virtually every cliché related to the heavier side of doom metal, bar none (sans sludge and stoner). So while their emotive aspects are a tad plastic-made and don't sound as genuine as needed, the band compensate for their lack of real emotions (or the faulty conveying of such), with something else: their song writing talent, evident in abundance through every track. Their melodies are superb, lush, elegant, grabbing and simply beautiful.

Professionally produced, in the best Solitude Productions tradition, this multi-instrumental, multi-faceted, multi-lingual album is a gigantic piece where very different aesthetics converge and aptly intertwine, coiling around each other like dark snakes with a death wish.

The melancholy is there, embedded into every sound, but somehow this album lacks an extra punch of emotion; these sentiments, it so badly in need of, would be able to transcend the album from the mundane into the divine. People like this reviewer would rather sacrifice the polished production on the altar of a more genuinely pronounced emotional effort; an effort that is able to infuse those plastic emotions with a shot of organic, biologically viable and vibrant human sentiments. Then and there we can all sit down -- and weep together.

Contact: http://etmoriemur.bandcamp.com/album/ex-nihilo-in-nihilum

(article published 8/7/2015)


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