In the Depths of R'lyeh

From time to time there emerge artists that capture the archetype of some aspect of reality or genre almost effortlessly, as if their genius molds various constructs together in a fit of destiny not much unlike geniuses of physics, like Newton, or Math like Godel. Almost always these artists are short-lived, leaving behind their very few monuments to mankind to be enshrined in and judged by history rather than obscured by any further efforts on following albums or the band's evolution and search for their next seminal work. Examples are bands like Disembowelment, Thergothon, Demilich, and Acid Bath, forever fossilized as cult exemplars, securing their place in the informal metal hall of fame off of usually 3 or fewer paradigm shaking releases. Catacombs is such a band, and year by year its paragon capturing masterpiece righteously expands the cult following to place Catacombs in the metal hall of fame for its contributions to funeral doom, doom metal, and heavy metal music.

Few albums can claim that they begin prior to the first track, but "In the Depths of R'lyeh" transcends the meek audio-physical limitations and captures the participant first with the title and artwork to set and fit the concept and atmosphere unlike most albums. Most albums aren't bound by such a dark and nigh mystical sense of wholeness. To get to where Xathagorra must have gone to in imagining the landscape of his sound, we must likewise descend into our dark insane servility before the surreal forever-mysterious cosmos. When we finally humble ourselves before its representation in Cthulhu in the artwork, we then become freshly prepared initiates for the opening of the next dimension.

The very opening rips your expectations asunder, piercing your ears with an atypical sharpness for funeral doom, before descending likewise sharply into the relentless pit of a darkening, spiraling vortex of inescapably drowning transitions. Halfway into the first track you start to realize that you've just crossed the event horizon of your journey, and didn't realize that you've been being pulled in, down into the well of dread. But it is now too late for you, as your destiny is incomplete without seeing this journey to its end.

By the time you get to "At the Edge of the Abyss" you've had gone through a labyrinth that's reshaped your body by pulling and twisting, not knowing where this beautiful nightmare is going. But at the edge of this new abyss, your realize how small and insignificant your previous wisdom and experience really was. You may have thought that after 2 tracks and 28 minutes in, you would have come to know what to expect and even applauded the album for how well it captures the eerie gloom of the Lovecraftian Universe, but then "At the Edge of the Abyss" enshrouds and consumes you to the point that it's difficult to describe what calls your attention except for all of it.

There's something to be said about artistic expression that captures the perfect unique mold, but that ultimately fails to be describe by mere words. The spiraling, repetition of permeating keyboards escalate the anticipation of the ineffable doom as you approach 8 minutes and 21 seconds into this third track which marks exactly the midway point of the album and also the exact moment of a downward spiral transitioning to a seemingly upwards swing... as if precisely orchestrated. In retrospect the first half of your journey does now, looking back, seem like a long descent into a trench of foreboding doom that hits you before you have a chance of realizing your enslavement to it. Suddenly you've come face to face with the Lovecraftian horror as it fills your body with Xathagorra's Cthulhian vocals. This album, and this track particularly, is a journey with layers of complexity and depth that can't all be captured in one listen; years later it reveals new structures. This journey continues as the Cthulhu worthy rasps reverberate like empty space imploding rather than a source producing sound. The display is in full form on "Where No Light Hath Shone... (But For That of the Moon)" as you grasp to whatever is left of your expectations and Xathagorra consumes you whole as you float within the caverns of his echoes.

This album, especially with proper headphones, reveals layers of cataclysmic soundscapes that together form a uniquely crafted masterpiece. It's not often that an album can evoke a sense of respect from a listener, beyond the regular type of awe at epic, badass, and pivotal albums. It really requires some touch of near mystical combination of insight, feel, luck, and artistry. This is one such album, and it turns the regular subject-object, or listener-source, experience on its head making the listener and source undergo a fascinating fusion of time and mind. One may even feel as if led by the album, as if one's time didn't belong to them but to the direction of the sound. This is a normal effect of the visceral, hypnotic, and intoxicating desolation produced by this reality weaver. I'm writing this review some 12 years after purchasing the album and listening to it many times throughout the years, with each journey being as captivating as the previous, and revealing layers of intricate twisted design. Witness this monument and testament to cosmic inspired genius as it easily secures its place in metal history and Lovercraftian culture.

This sweeping ballad of funereal excess weaves Lovecraftian threads of misery into the psyche of the attentive listener with a sublime dexterity not commonly found in the genre. The combined effect on the mind of these songs, which are of a fundamentally repetitive and simplistic nature, is deeply mystical. Ecstasy-inducing waves of heavy guitar riffs plod to a backdrop of detached, glacial percussion. The snare resounding in adagio tempo like drops of water falling from a pendent mass of ice onto a cave floor below. The use of reverb works to give the snare a cold, detached quality, which when allied to the overlaid powerchords imbues them with a melancholic poignancy.

The first song, “In the Depths of R'lyeh”, begins with an interplay between strings and percussion. One calls, and the other answers in kind. It is bona fide Lovecraftian horror in its execution. This masterfully-crafted paean to darkness brings to the forefront the startling reality of the feral in Nature. Drawing to its close its coda is a recapitulation of the opening chords, sealing the song. This is the only song that is explicitly Lovecraftian in lyrical content. The rest of the tracks are as such solely in aesthetic, in so far as they readily maintain the atmosphere of hopelessness and fatal resignation.

Some songs, like “Dead Dripping City”, are slower than the first, and more repetitive. They run through about three themes or so throughout their course, changing theme only when the preceding one is fully-developed, which takes minutes to do, and ending in gloriously extended codas of pure, unadulterated doom riffs. “Where No Light Hath Shone... (But for that of the Moon)” is, structurally, a hybrid of “Dead Dripping City” and “At the Edge of the Abyss”, taking elements of the two and compressing them into twelve minutes. Meanwhile, the thematic riff used at the close of “At the Edge of the Abyss” is reintroduced and explicated in “Fallen into Shadow”. I should like to add that the last song, which is also by far the shortest, is actually just the vocalist chanting a single line in repetition to the background of percussion and strings. It has no readily discernable structure as a result, but it is a fitting finale to this ponderous work.

It is a most wonderful thing to behold such a work of constrained aggression, kept in check by such excellent pacing, which serves to draw out the feeling of melancholia, temporally speaking, to critical levels. The mercilessness of these heavy guitars serves to invests the listener in a weighted cloak of sheer misery. The profound beauty of these riffs lies in their uncanny ability to effect upon the mind a lasting gloom.

Ultimately, this is not music for the impatient; nor is it music for those who find doom laborious, slow and unlistenable. This is doom in every sense of the word. It is doom made solely for listeners of doom. It is inaccessible, gelid and plodding, and demands of the listener an inestimable patience. As such, if the listener will critically engage with the material at hand, paying a studied attention to the intricacy of its structure, the sparsity of its overlaying aesthetic, the grandeur of its thematic content, and the way in which these three components intertwine to produce a deeply engrossing experience, he will be most heavily rewarded. Mastered by only a few, In the Depths of R'lyeh is undeniably a triumphant marriage of atmosphere and concept.

I didn't believe this to be that bad of an album when I first picked it up. It seemed to capture the dark, opressive, mysterious ambience of the Cthulu Mythos better than most Lovecraft-inspired music I've heard.

That was at first listen. After careful consideration and multiple listens, I began to come to the conclusion that "In the Depths of R'lyeh" is not really all that great after all...as an ALBUM. I have to make that a point. Listening to this album in peices is much more enjoyable than listening to it as a whole.

You see, the songs are all EXACTLY the same. Its not that they're bad songs, but the monotony on this album is literally mind-blowing. The only thing I've heard that comes close to this level of monotony is Sleep's "Jerusalem", but at least that was just one song. "In the Depths of R'lyeh" is six.

I entertain the idea that the monotony was meant to be a part of the oppressive atmosphere of the music, but when the listener wouldn't be able to tell the difference between songs without looking at the track number, I'm less inclined to think that it was some brilliant artsy move and more the product of unplanned songwriting.

The general structure of the songs are typical funeral doom fare: A heavily distorted bass chord and sluggish, pounding drums with a simplistic, higher pitched, minor-key, note-by-note riff on top of it all, seasoned with low, growling and completely indiscernable vocals. Repeated the entire song.

I think the underlying problem with the album is that there isn't enough variation in the different song's riffs. LIstening to "Dead Dripping City", I quickly turned it to the next song and the riff was almost the same, but in a different key.

Enough of the bad, I do not mean this to be a negative review and it isn't my purpouse to completely bash the album. Any of the songs on "In the Depths of R'lyeh" damn near perfectly capture the aforementioned Lovecraftian atmosphere. The music brings to mind giant, misshapen creatures, huge stone cities. The music is eerie and mysterious, the perfect soundtrack to any nightmare of lumbering horrors.

Catacombs made a decent album here just so long as the songs are listened to individually and never as a whole album. Doing the latter could cause you to become annoyed with the music.

I had waited a long time for the man behind Hierophant to finally record a full-length release, but by the time this album was announced, I had honestly given up.

Back when the Hierophant was still releasing material, funeral doom seemed like a genre ripe with possibility. I then just discovering bands like Thergothon and Esoteric, and now here was this new band, very much like the other heavyweights of the style but as different from them as they were from one another. What other exciting artistic developments could come from this burgeoning, untapped subgenre?

As it turns out: nothing! Or very near to it. What a crushing disappointment this whole “funeral doom” business has been: lots of gimmicks and amateurs, not too many real ideas, and it’s impossibly hard to sort out the good stuff.

We can consider ourselves lucky that Xathagorra Mlandroth (who previously released music under the pseudonym “J. Del Russi”) saw fit to return, and that he brought with him the artistry that we would hope for. This is easily the best release he’s unleashed yet, in my opinion.

Catacombs sounds like death/doom distillate – the pure essence that bands like Disembowelment and Thergothon hinted at, abstracted into its base elements and then made concrete again. Aesthetically, it’s sparse but essential: a downtuned guitar, a higher-pitched one, drums, death vocals, and quite a bit of repetition.

Articulation is more important than style, and it’s a quality that funeral doom bands tend to lack… they usually have very conventional riffing, and any embellishments for the sake of originality get smeared over the top and are tangential. In the end, the atmosphere comes more from the aesthetics than the execution, and it gets old really fast because there just isn’t anything to the music.

Catacombs, by contrast, is heavy on execution, although it’s stripped down to its barest elements. I’m reminded of albums like Transilvanian Hunger or some of Burzum’s music, where there’s not much there, but what is there has been carefully arranged to the point of perfection. I’ve listened to this album countless times, and I can anticipate every transition, every shift in the drum beat, even every slight waver in guitar tone. The songwriting's great, but it’s not the common notion of what “songwriting” ought to sound like. On the other hand, it’s not amorphous, meandering ambiance, either. It lives and breathes by lopsided time signatures and weird melodies and guitar bends: the geometry is all wrong. Even moments of silence are used consciously. The production is perfect as well.

Music like this has been attempted by many, but it’s never been done this perfectly.
A lot of effort could be put into attempting to analyze just how this album is working, probably without bearing much fruit. It should be enough to note that it possesses an intuitive understanding of how to convey atmosphere and ambiance, through everything from melody to production. One Hierophant track was re-recorded for this album, and it’s amazing to consider how different it feels than the original, in spite of being essentially the same song. It’s an example of how finely-tuned that above-mentioned intuition is, that such powerful ambiance can be achieved with so little apparent effort. Every tiny subtlety and nuance is precisely on target.

Catacombs is pure darkness and demands an overactive imagination. Only one song has explicitly Lovecraftian lyrics but the whole album aims to confront the listener with an incomprehensible horror, as well as the possibility of an undetected reality more powerful and significant than the mundane one in which we typically participate. Put this album on late at night and really take it in.

Six songs, 72 minutes – you do the maths. This is one incredibly slooooooow and motherfuckingly heavy slab of extreme doom metal from Catacombs, the solo project of Xathagorra Mlandroth, a.k.a. John Del Russi (guess which is his real name!). In The Depths Of R'lyeh is Catacomb’s debut album, following the demise of Mlandroth’s previous project Heirophant. Monstrously deep vocals like the rumblings of Satan’s bowels spread themselves over 10 b.p.m. drums and huge distorted reverb chords moving at the speed of frozen tar. High and diabolically discordant guitar leads add to the suffocating atmosphere of despair and unease. The crystal-clear production of the album merely adds to the exquisite torment – if the sound was sludgy and muddy, it would be less involving, but as it is, it’s completely compelling. Lyrics (that’s a laugh – I defy you to distinguish a single word without a crib sheet), song titles and the cover art all make reference to the Cthulhu mythos of cult horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, whose schlocky, overwrought tales of human disintegration and derangement in the face of overwhelming cosmic evil have inspired many artists and musicians since their publication in the 20s and 30s. The second track, ‘Dead Dripping City’ (presumably Lovecraft’s sunken city of R’lyeh, where mighty Cthulhu, he of the tentacle-encrusted face and leathery bat-like wings, lies dreaming through the aeons) is the longest track on here, clocking in at 16’38”, and it’s the one I keep coming back to, though once you start playing this album, you may well find yourself reduced to a state of catatonic terror and unable to reach for the remote. Two-minute closing track ‘Awakening Of The World's Doom (Reprise)’ performs a merciful act of resuscitation and prepares the by now thoroughly crushed and demoralised listener to return to the real world.


Absolutely soul-obliterating, unremittingly bleak, and a work of twisted genius, In The Depths Of R'lyeh is an object lesson in just how extreme extreme metal can be. If you enjoy the work of doom bands like Sunn0))) and Earth, you’re well-primed for the slow ride into hope-extinguishing oblivion that is Catacombs. I’m not even all that much of a doom aficionado, I picked up on this because of the Lovecraft connection, but I just can’t leave this album alone. A couple of years ago, people were talking about how slow is the new loud – if so, this fucker goes to 11! Don’t expect the dance remix any time soon.

The word "Depression" is used quite frequently these days. Newsflash folks, you have yet experienced the feeling of depression in your life untill you listen to Catacomb's new album, titled In The Depths of R'lyeh. Catacombs is the one-man-band of Xathagorra Mlandroth, producing some of the most extreme Funeral Doom music I've ever heard. In The Depths of R'lyeh is actually the first ever full length album released by Xathagorra, although he's been active in the extreme metal scene since 1994.

The album starts with the title track, In The Depths of R'lyeh, an eleven minute piece that shows right from the very first second what are you dealing with – deeply distorted guitars combined with some high notes, extremely slow drumming and deep, depressing grunts. Combined together these elements create a very dark and dispiriting atmosphere. At this point I must note that although the obvious reference to H.P. Lovecraft's fantastic works in the title and cover of the album, Xathagorra Mlandroth claims that it was merely inspired by Lovecraft's writings and nothing more.

Dead Dripping City, the longest track on the album, keeps up with the dark line of it's former. Although there is a slight rise of tempo on this song it is still a very deep and even quite scary song, of the kind that will make you peek behind your shoulder and wonder if the devils are really coming for you or it's just the music messing with your mind.

By the time you get to the forth song of this album you really get the point and know what to expect from the song and it wont disappoint you in any way – again the slow drums, the high clean notes opposing stretched and heavily distorted riffs creating together one of the deepest and melancholic atmospheres ever recorded. When you finally get to the last track of the album, Awakening Of The World's Doom, you think that you're going to hear another long, slow and depressing song, but after a couple of seconds you gather that it's actually a sort of an outro that marks the exit from Xathagorra's doomed world and coming back to the real world.

I can not recommend this album to everyone. Only extreme doom metal fans will really enjoy an album like this one and it's probably not the best choice for someone who's trying to get into the Doom Metal genre, but it's surely a great album – amazing atmosphere, excellent production for an album this extreme and off stream, great concepts and lyrics… This is definitely an album that invades the deepest, darkest places of the listener and flows him with doom.

(Note: This is the English version of the review I wrote for this album on the site www.Metalist.co.il)