A funeral doom record coming from Peru is in some ways an anomaly, even more if we think that often, when this genre is proposed by musicians residing in nations without an established tradition in the field, the results are often full of naivety and imperfections in execution and production. This is certainly not the case of Sepultus Est, a band from Lima led by Lord Sepultus, who, while constituting the artistic and compositional fulcrum, does not settle for the shrunken condition of one man band but is helped in the writing of his work by a handful of musicians: just a certain care for details and an optimal writing launch this En El Marmoreo Laberinto Donde Sueñan Los Muertos among the potential surprises of the year just started, in the funeral field (the disc, in fact, has just been published by the Russian label GS Productions). Lord Sepultus certainly did not spare himself in his intent to throw us into the deepest abysses with his funereal inspiration, so the album touches the maximum allowed by the length of a CD (78 minutes) with the initial title track that, in turn, exceeds 40 minutes in duration: already from these cold numbers you can guess how the work is extreme, not so much from the point of view of sound as for the commitment that is required of the listener to grasp the best every nuance. Musically, we are in the funeral melodic area, with the mastermind’s keyboard to guide the plots of each song, now with painful melodic openings, now with piano passages that, all in all, represent a rather peculiar element. We were talking about the initial track, which tests the resistance of fans, because of a central part that hurts with its depressive drift, including extreme vocals that replace the growl dominant in the rest of the work: the right prize comes in the last ten minutes, to say the least wonderful in their repeated and evocative melodiousness. In the shortest (20 minutes…) Funebres Estatuas En El Jardin De La Muerte stands out a beautiful piano work that is basically what distinguishes it from the previous track, while Paisajes Depresivos, bonus track taken from a demo released in 2013, differs for its sometimes romantic gait, although always pervaded by that vein of sadness that is extinguished only with the last note of this very long work. Another name to pin for those who love these sounds.

2016 – GS Productions