Apocalypsis Damnare

The sonorously named Rigor Sardonicous delivers unto us its "third" album of crusty apocalyptic doom metal (actually a re-release of its first album of the same name) with the sleepy dinosaur vocal, the gallows humour and the out-of-tune cymbals. After a suitably po-faced exordium called - what else? - "Exordium" which is played on organ, the band whose members apparently include "?!" on drums and percussion plunges into its trawl through a scum-laden swamp of bass-heavy, mud-filled steel guitar buzz that mostly heaves up and down like a marsh monster content mainly to snooze beneath its cover of leaves and muck, its back lifting its extra skin up and down above the mud's surface. Trudging programmed beats and what sounds like an array of gongs, cymbals, garbage bin lids and cut-out bottoms of metal pots and pans that cover the whole scale of crashing tin complement the guitars which move at a slow pace. If all this music doesn't sound thick enough for you, fear not for it is all overlaid by RS leader Joseph J Fogarazzo's unique vocal which is akin to a prehistoric dino-critter's gizzard afflicted with a bad case of dyspepsia after its dim-witted sauropod owner swallowed too many stones to grind up its food and now the rocks are crumbling up against each other the wrong way.

Thick and lava-like as it is, the band's sound isn't so thick that it overpowers the percussion and rhythms which turn out to be the most varied and interesting part of the band's style. The cymbals have a clear sharp sound which contrasts with the guitar noise ooze. For this kind of sludgy rolling guitar noise, the entire record's ambience is surprisingly clean, clear and open so every muddied nuance of Fogarazzo's rumble-mumbled lyrics can be heard fairly clearly. The strings operate within a narrow range of deathened doom sound and mostly steer clear of anything resembling ego-laden flash like a five-second lead melody (at least until the last track where a thin solo lead guitar can be heard), concentrating on playing repeated riffs that provide the backbone for the songs. It's up to the percussion to provide excitement and the cymbals certainly rise to the occasion on tracks like "Human Rot" where it seems every corner of the RS swamp world has a metal disc ready for bashing no matter how badly it's tuned or set up. Other worthy tracks in the rhythm department are "Holy Suicide" which features some industrial rattle and is quite fast in parts, and "Misery" which chops along at a speedy clip with sharp if minimal drumming and a machine-gun rhythm at the beginning. The guitars are work harder and faster with a more complex melody and this encourages the cymbals to bang and crash at a higher and more demented level of activity.

In case RS has fans out there who actually wish to sing along with Joseph J (it might help if you graze on some gravel to get your throats prepared), the musicians kindly provide printed lyrics which revolve around death and dying. The words veer a little to the overcooked side but I guess it's the nature of the deathly doom beast the RS guys are dealing with that demands stuff like "... Nocturnal, desolate obeisance, condensed state of consciousness / Existence writhing of flesh - forgotten sorrow / Stench of remains reeks - eternal tomorrow ..." ("Human Rot") and "... Unborn malaised yearning / Putrefy to life's end / Stagnant breath and blood / Virulent circle ..." ("Pandemic"). The imagery is quite vivid and I'm starting to get a whiff of the decay and gases coming out of stomachs as their dead owners start to swell. I believe in a previous life Fogarazzo studied mortuary science and worked as a licensed funeral director for a while so he sure knows his subject matter well.

In its own way this is a fun and hilarious recording with tinny cymbal crashes coming at you from all directions and Fogarazzo's laboured lamentations gurgling from deep within a gargantuan gut vying for being the most comic aspect of the RS style. Jeez, writing about this album is overcooking my own thoughts and words. The general thrust of the music tends to be minimal and rather low-key so listeners must not expect any great sparks from the guitars until later in the album when the strings do spring into life and become aggressive and sharp. They're not so much in the style of doom metal as they are in the style of slowed-down death metal with an industrial influence which becomes more obvious on faster songs like "Misery". Whoever's working the drum machine and other gadgets churning out the beats and rhythms, and is also in charge of the sheet metal orchestra, has the unenviable task of keeping listeners interested and this fella delights in wacking and banging the tins with glee, not caring if the results are all off-key and are driving some people nuts.

As with their second album "Principial Sardonica", the Rigor Sardonicous men dedicate this slab of unhealthy and thickened doom crust to themselves. How could you not love these guys?

I first heard of this band flipping through some online catalog or label website and I was not expecting much. Apparently they were some sort of ultra-extreme death doom band – okay, that sounds good – that had languished in obscurity since their inception over a decade ago – well, perhaps not so good. Truly obscure bands usually earn their obscurity the honest way, and even as something of a death doom enthusiast, Rigor Sardonicous had remained completely unknown to me. How good could they possibly be?

Thank the devil for mp3 samples, because I knew after just a few seconds of listening that I was going to buy this. Just a few times in my life I’ve been so overwhelmed by the sheer awesomeness of a band’s aesthetic on first exposure that I actually laughed in sick glee. Demoncy’s Joined in Darkness comes to mind as an example. If you’ve heard that one, you should know what I mean. Another example would be Rigor Sardonicous.

Even at this point in the game, where extreme doom is ubiquitous and poking around beneath a storage shed with a flashlight is likely to reveal an infestation of funeral doom bands, you’re not going to mistake Rigor Sardonicous for any other band. The guitars are downtuned straight to hell, as you would expect, but they’re more of a hum than a buzz – a continual low-frequency shockwave piped directly into the subconscious. The drumming impressed me right away with its weird ritualistic overtones, a little (a very little) like Skepticism. In reality it’s a drum machine, and stands as a handy refutation of the notion that a drum machine must necessarily sound fake and mechanical.

And then there are the vocals, which are pitch shifted. That’s probably going to stick out more than anything else, at least on first listen. It would be a bit redundant to point out that you’ll either love them or hate them since that goes for every other aspect of the band’s sound as well.

The songwriting is primitive, stripped down to virtually nothing, with the natural side effect of placing extra emphasis on what is there, and relies equally on the ambiance of the notes hanging in the air as the melody of the riffing. Instead of moving forward with an apparent groove, the music just sinks – sinks in. In general, this is a very off-kilter band, with a unique outlook and approach, and it would be difficult to catalog all of the ways in which this is true, but even in what one might presume to be a fairly limited style of music, they don’t do anything in a stereotypical or clichéd way.

The band’s self-described label is “Raw Apocalyptic Doom” and that is as accurate as anything I could hope to come up with. They are artistic but not “artsy” and the atmosphere conveyed by their music differs markedly from the elegance and nobility aspired to by so many other metal bands; it makes me think of cockroaches crawling through the ruins after the bombs drop. Not for everyone, naturally, but definitely for me.

(This album, incidentally, is a re-recorded version of an earlier release which I have not heard in full, and the effect of the production is good enough that I presume it to be an improvement.)