Day: December 29, 2013

The opportunity to talk about Peruvians Mirthless also allows us to take the pulse of the South American doom scene, outside the happy island represented by Chile. With sporadic exceptions, in other nations the genre has not achieved similar growth, and indeed all this can be seen by listening to the long-distance debut from the Peruvian combo, coming after a decade of activity in the course of which two demos and an ep have been released. A Dirge For Your Suicide itself is an album all in all rather short by the genre’s standards: among the five tracks into which it is divided, the first two are undoubtedly the most successful in that they show a decent if not particularly innovative vein; undoubtedly Mirthless‘ main endowment is precisely the genuine passion that shines through their work accentuated by a rather handcrafted production. The death doom of the Lima trio is, moreover, aligned with tradition, does not indulge in a particular melodic search and possesses the virtue of not adhering too faithfully to a specific stylistic model: as mentioned above, Pantheon Of Disgraces and Prelude To Doomsday are good tracks in their essentiality, aided by the use of an acceptable growl, while the next track, the very long title track, proves to be the classic shot in the arm by containing in its quarter hour the worst of the genre’s clichés, from the sample-based introduction containing a sequence of heartbreaking screams, to the use of a clean but plaintive vocal, resting on a musical carpet devoid of outlets for a final result that leaves as its only sensation an inevitable tedium. The brief Paz and a different version of Prelude To Doomsday close on a slight crescendo an album that frankly can be derubricated as barely sufficient precisely because of its inability to make a mark, demonstrating that, outside of the southwestern tongue of the earth, in the rest of the continent the doom scene still suffers from a certain disconnect from the natural points of reference such as the European and North American schools.

2013 – Dunkelheit Produktionen