Funeral doom in Panama has an undisputed protagonist in the person of Ricardo “Lebzul” Brenes, promoter of two not inconsiderable bands such as Lake Of Depression and Doomslut. The Central American musician has always had a certain experimental nature in his DNA, and already with the self-titled demo of Lake Of Depression (2005), accompanied by Alejandro Escarriola (bass and guitar) he highlighted a form of oblique and changing funeral with all the approximations of the case; the content of the demo was transposed in the same way in the split album Infinity In Souls of 2006 together with the Polish band Source of Deep Shadows and the two Russian bands Квазар and Crepuscularia. In 2007, the first Doomslut album was released, the demo Overtones From The Clitorian Chasm: here, with the active contribution of Alex Flamanegra, the proposal took on the contours of a combination of drone and dark ambient. Both projects underwent a long stop and then reappeared in recent times, first Lake Of Depression with the single The Dead Whale (2019), one of the four tracks included in the split album with fellow countrymen Skoll, El Trágico Llanto Del Valle. It was a good test which was followed by the return of Doomslut, struggling with the full length Dissonant Evil, consisting of two long tracks that showed an atmospheric but at the same time oppressive face, which kept drone and ambient components but to a much smaller extent than the debut of 2007. A very prolific period ends with Decadencia, the first full length under the name of Lake Of Depression; it’s a work that is finally complete, showing different shades ranging from soft ambient brushstrokes to accelerations of clear death matrix, without forgetting more canonically funeral parts, as in Memorial Monoliths and in the already known but revisited The Dead Whale. A few drops in tension and perhaps a certain dilution of content makes the work of Brenes (helped on bass in almost all tracks by Eduardo Vanegas) still susceptible to improvement, even in the vocal section. The fact remains that all these releases confirm a slow, but constant evolution on the part of the Panamanian musician, who is able to offer a funeral that doesn’t disfigure compared to those coming from more traditional countries for this genre.

2020 – Jabanà Records