Day: March 21, 2018

After a few years of activity dotted with the release of several demos and singles, the time has come for the Peruvian band Antichrist to make their long-distance debut. Pax Moriendi is a work soaked in a rough and essential death doom, made a little softer by a keyboard that gives a vaguely horrific touch to the whole, with a growl that is instead attested on a rant mode that gives nothing, least of all to the intelligibility of the lyrics. We are therefore in the parts of the interpretation of the genre closer to bands like Disembowelment, but in a less harsh and dissonant way, and everything succeeds in an appreciable way to the South American band, which sometimes offers glimpses of melody as in the final part of the opener Forgotten In Nameless Suffering, and still maintaining along the three quarters of an hour of the album a good level, even when the rhythms intensify moving the bar towards a putrid death of Floridian school accompanied by the ever-present keyboard in the background. In the previous cases in which I had come across doom bands from the Andean country I was not particularly impressed, being mostly appreciable works for genuineness but, at the same time, approximate and too meager for sound output; on the contrary, Antichrist, while not being among the most refined interpreters of the genre, definitely know their stuff and put to good use the experience gained through an approach dark, direct and adequate production to the need. To be noted also the goodness of the long final track You Will Never See Sun Light, a good example of funeral that goes to draw from the already mentioned seminal Australian band as well as from Evoken: Pax Moriendi turns out to be a long-distance debut of absolute level for Antichrist (which certainly does not benefit more than much a moniker demanding and a bit inflated), able to show a potential far from trivial and harbinger therefore of other mournful fruits in the near future.

2018 – Iron Bonehead Productions/ Into the Abyss Domains