“This is the lacerating and deadly litany that comes when you combine two sonic reagents like the murkiest sludge and funeral doom. Ideal soundtrack for a post-apocalyptic Western. A sonic mixture with stars and stripes patent, that only damn rednecks from Ohio could come up with.” I steal this brilliant comment from my friend Alberto “Morpheus”, soul of the Facebook page Doom Heart, who has photographed as best as he could the content of The Wayward And The Lost, third full length of Beneath Oblivion, a Cincinnati band that for over a decade now has been afflicting doom fans with its leaden and muddy sounds. It took them seven years to follow up their previous album From Man To Dust but, as it often happens, the wait was not in vain, because Scotty T. Simpson and associates have given birth to a devastating monolith that, as already mentioned, seems the ideal meeting point between sludge and funeral doom. The balance remains throughout this abundant hour of sorrowful music, which drags on without any semblance of acceleration, sometimes offering melodic openings that do not lift the soul but contribute to afflict it further, as happens with the beautiful guitar passages of Liar’s Cross, where they push themselves to the parts of the vintage Mournful Congregation (not the relatively more airy ones of the last The Incubus Of Karma). But overall, The Wayward And The Lost doesn’t leave much room for glimmers of light, with a sound that unfolds with the slowness of a lava flow close to solidification: dark, painful and often overpowered by the harsh vocals of the guitarist and founder of the band, the album collects the best of the nuances of the doom matrix to convey them in one long march to a nebulous and undefined shores, a landing place where they converge the various drives that animate the best doom records, as it is the one offered by Beneath Oblivion.

2018 – Weird Truth Productions