I’ve been waiting for a long time for a new name that would enrich the funeral doom scene with its presence, given the prolonged standstill of most of the historical bands in recent years. Mesmur come to fill this momentary void with a monumental work as S, not only confirming the good things they had already done with the eponymous debut album but even perfecting and focusing on the best features of the genre. The quarter of an hour of Singularity already smells like a masterpiece, with the funeral doom that ascends to the peaks on which they are seated bands like Esoteric, Evoken, Ea, Mournful Congregation, Monolithe and Worship, from which Mesmur draw the best to weave their painful musical design. The founder and main composer of the band, the American Jeremy Lewis, with his work on guitar and keyboards outlines a painful but full of emotion pace, at least in the opening track and in the equally long and subsequent Exile: here the six-string produces an excruciating lament before the growl of the Australian Chris G, vocalist also of the excellent Orphans Of Dusk, takes over throwing the sound into an abyss of darkness. The band is completed by a rhythmic couple decidedly incisive and equally dynamic (if compared to the genre, of course) formed by drummer John Devos (together with Lewis in the blacksters DallaNebbia) and Italian bassist Michele Mura (former Lightless Moor): an internationality that confirms Mesmur‘s status as a project (at least for now) exclusively for the studio (after all, even in the previous album the bass was entrusted to a musician living in the old continent, in the person of Norwegian Aslak Karlsen Hauglid). Distension, the third track that always travels on the quarter of an hour of duration, shows more dissonance and, if possible, drags in an even more painful than the previous tracks, finding a poignant melodic glimmer in its final part. S = k ln Ω closes this beautiful work with six instrumental minutes in which the initial ambient drone dissolves into notes soaked in a cosmic melancholy, the predominant feature of a magnificent work that is proposed as the best for detachment of 2017 in this field, unless desirable denials in recent months.

2017 – Solitude Productions