Timewrought Kings is the first album of the Dutch band Apotelesma, but it risks to be also the last one, since immediately after its realization the band decided to suspend the activity indefinitely. A pity, because these guys, started in 2012 with the moniker Monuments, with which they produced an ep, seem to master with good ease the death doom material and, not surprisingly, have attracted the attention of a label specializing in these sounds as the Solitude. Timewrought Kings is a sour work and rather poor in melodic cues, traceable to some fleeting guitar litany or in the passages that accompany the clean voice, so the only variations on the theme are the rhythmic ones, in the form of more liquid and rarefied moments that are found in these four main tracks (the third, which gives the album its title, is actually a short instrumental episode). Compared to the Dutch school, Apotelesma drew something from Officium Triste, especially in the slower and more evocative phases, when the pace becomes more painful, but they don’t have the same melodic appeal of Blankenstein’s band, which makes the album definitely good but rather stingy of flashes of authentic and painful beauty. The tracklist is of rather uniform value, with the more rocky The Weakest Of Men that is preferred for its organicity combined with several excellent guitar cues, but the whole reasonably suggests that Apotelesma have not yet given as much as seems to be in their possibilities; at this point, if only to verify the validity of this impression, we can only hope that the period of reflection taken by the band is only a moment of stand-by and not the final end of an adventure, after all, just started.
2017 – Solitude Productions
Mournful Sounds 
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