The one offered by the Belgian Monads is one of the always welcome surprises that cheer the doom fans looking for new realities able to introduce them into the maze of a leaden and painful feeling. The Flemish band showed itself for the first time in 2011 with the demo Intellectus Iudicat Veritatem, and then did not give more news about itself discographically before this first full length entitled IVIIV. Despite the collocation in the funeral field, it is immediately clear that the sound of Monads has more facets because, after a great opening in line with the tradition of the genre, we find guitar arpeggios that bring back to certain post metal and to those passages more rarefied typical of Mournful Congregation, the seminal band from which ours certainly draw inspiration (not only for the moniker that recalls one of the most important works, The Monad Of Creation). The four long songs refer to the southern hemisphere without forgetting the best central European tradition of the genre, sometimes finding a certain closeness to Worship, but without reaching the same exasperation in slowing down the rhythms. So the acoustic textures, as well as being appreciable, do not break the tension but prepare the return on the proscenium of the growl and a heavy and diluted riffing. The album doesn’t leave too much space to melody, depicting a motionless and monochromatic scenario, with the partial exception of a song like The Despair Of An Aeon, magnificent for the powerful drama that manages to evoke during its fifteen minutes of funereal pace. The models taken as an example by Monads are important and cumbersome but the Belgian quintet does not disfigure at all in the comparison, thanks to a proposal whose essentiality never goes to the detriment of the construction of a harsh sound and, at the same time, steeped in a melancholy that remains mostly soft but equally perceptible. IVIIV turns out to be a long-distance debut of absolute level, confirming the quality exhibited in a timely manner by the bands that are part of the roster of Aesthetic Death.

2017 – Aesthetic Death