Day: February 7, 2023

Rigor Sardonicous were among the first in the United States to offer a form of funeral death doom with the demo Risus ex Mortuus in 1994, even though the extreme and tetragonous character of their proposal has always confined them to the unhealthiest underground unlike, for example, their contemporaries Evoken. In fact, almost thirty years have passed and the New York duo continues to play that same primitive form of the subgenre undaunted, even if today’s sound appears cleaner and imperceptibly more listenable (adjectives that must be contextualised by examining the band’s past, let’s be clear, but the semblance of melody that, for example, peeps out in Voluntatem Dei is in its own way a first). Five years after the lengthy Ep Ridenti Mortuus, with his sixth full length the duo formed by Joseph Fogarazzo and Glenn Hampton continues to express their disgust against humanity without mediation by means of a sound that is itself a kind of rant as is the voice. Praeparet Bellum (the album titles as well as the song titles have almost always been in Latin) is yet another work in which they manage to place themselves one step beyond the thin border that separates the cacophony from the propose an extreme art form; obviously, Rigor Sardonicous do absolutely nothing to blandish who have always adversed or underestimated them, and their great coherence is both their worst limit and their best merit, even if I do not hesitate to define this new work as much more mature and better defined than what has been done in the past and without any step backwards in terms of stylistic integrity. Rigor Sardonicous tell us to prepare for war, but they are the first to know that, in the end, everyone is at war from the moment he emits his first wailing and what they offer is the tragic soundtrack that accompanies our existences, even if most people is not able to perceive it.

2023 – Memento Mori Records