It had been rumoured for some time that Comatose Vigil, the masters of Russian funeral doom, might return, and that a follow-up to their 2011 masterpiece Fuimus, Non Sumus… was expected. In fact, in 2014 there had been a reunion that had led the band to perform a few live dates, but the dissolution, apparently final, had been announced inexorably after some time. Even without knowing the dynamics within the band in depth, the reason for this could be guessed when unpleasant exchanges began on social media between Alexander ViG’iLL Orlov and Andrey A.K. iEzor Karpukhin; nothing new in the musical field, basically, and even if the cake to be shared is much smaller doom is not exempt from these events: it’s certain that we find ourselves now with two entities with the same name, the first prerogative of Orlov and the second, with the suffix A.K., of Karpukhin, still has a strange effect. But in any case, those of us who love this kind of music, and therefore a band like the one from Moscow, cannot but rejoice in front of this new Evangelium Nihil, the debut album of Comatose Vigil with the extension A.K., which sees the vocalist availing himself of the help of the talented Georgian musician David Unsaved of the magnificent Ennui, who masterfully takes care of all the instrumentation except for the drums, entrusted to the American John Devos of the emerging Mesmur. It must be said immediately that the sound offered does not betray in any way the original spirit of the moniker: the sound moves dramatic and majestic, centered on a carpet of keyboards on which falls a rhythmic bradycardic and the pitiless growl of A.K. iEzor. There is therefore a strong continuity with what happened with Fuimus, not Sumus…, even if that work was perhaps even more minimal and less enveloping: for almost an hour and a quarter the four long songs overthrow themselves on the psyche of the listener, forcing him into a viscous bubble within which the emptiness of existence is painted in such a hypnotic and diluted way to make impossible any reaction, when reality manifests itself in all its horror before the eyes. Evangelium Nihil winds obsessively, leaving no respite while dragging painfully for over three quarters of an hour of sublime funeral, before inflicting the final blow with the wonderful final twenty minutes of The Day Heaven Fell, a true quintessence of the genre in its most atmospheric. If someone should complain about the excessive stylistic uniformity, it’s good to invite him to devote himself to genres more suited to him: here the pace is exactly the same from the first to the 72nd minute and when the only element of discontinuity arrives, in the form of a sort of radio interference placed in the middle of the title track, it is basically just a disturbing element. Evangelium Nihil is exactly what we hoped Comatose Vigil would give us again sooner or later, regardless of their configuration: this is funeral doom, the instrument of choice for reaching catharsis through the almost physical evocation of a pain that seems impossible to circumscribe.

2018 – Non Serviam Records