Debut on cassette tape for this mysterious US band devoted to death doom of undoubted quality. Leaving aside a recording that sometimes sacrifices the growl by giving it a reverberation that does not suit it, Of Lachrymose Grief presents three tracks for a good half hour of music, all from the sack of Weightlessness (the fourth track is a cover of Solitude by Black Sabbath), which provides more than one reason for interest. Meanwhile, the first aspect that emerges overbearingly is the successful blending of the intimate vein typical of doom with a melodic taste close to black: often the parts merge optimally while at other junctures they split without negatively affecting the compositional structure. The long opener, lasting more than a quarter of an hour, amply shows all the peculiar characteristics of the band, which, starting from a semi-acoustic approach, lets itself go to accelerations that, as said, bring back more to a “Cascadian” black than to a more classic death doom; By The Lore Of A Morose Stench further amplifies this vein, which could be defined as dreamy if it were not exhibited through heavy riffs like boulders and the aforementioned harsh growl, however functional to the cause. Swallowed The Sun And The Moon gets its start as if it were a track by Dooom‘s Worship, then moving into the territories of the funeral from the most oppressive rhythms to open up for a moment almost subduedly to the acoustic side until plunging back into catacomb-like riffs but always imbued with an appreciable melodic component. Also very nice is the aforementioned cover of Solitude which, despite being in a much slower version than the original, does not lose an ounce of its epic and evocative vein. Nice surprise indeed these Weightlessness, about whom it would be nice to know a little more, but in the end what matters is the music and here, for doom lovers, there is plenty of quality to be quite satisfied with.

2014 – Graceless Recordings