Nekus

Nekus

Sepulchral Divination

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***German/Italian cave-dwelling sepulchral blackened death-doom primitives Nekus (formed by current and past members of Putridarium, Into Coffin, Hadit, Omnivore, and Bestial Warfare, among others) emerge with their hideous debut 2LP Sepulchral Divination, over fifty minutes of aphotic, downtuned subsonic horror emanating from the wretched bowels of the abyss. Comparable in sheer ugliness and inhumanity to other slowed down sepulchral death and doom metal abominations like Grave Upheaval, Moss, Anatomia, and Encoffination, Nekus are conjurors of a lightless subterranean realm somewhere between the pits of hell and the center of the earth where existence may assume horrific forms and where life as we know it is impossible. Indeed this monstrous, fifty-plus minute crawling nightmare of horrid, telluric mummified death doom is not something of the plane of being or of surface-dwelling, air-breathing and light-needing existence. Rather, a decomposing, lightless, sinkhole of putrefied sonic emanations opening an abyss unto the dimensions below the earth's crust, where eons of putrefaction, fossilization, gravitational crush depth and infernal magmatic upheaval perpetually beholds the inaccessible omnipotence of death and inexorably calls all surface life to it.

Nekus

Death Apophenia

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***The German underworld lurkers of humongous subsonic death return with Death Apophenia, a death-scarred sonic interment into absolute subterranean torment, and their most lightless and catacombal statement to date. The colossal sophomore full-length entombment expands on the putrid and crushing heaviness of its critically acclaimed predecessor Sepulchral Divination, taking the band's formula of droning sepulchral death doom to its most inevitable and horrendous triumph yet. With its forty-plus minute running time split up in just five pachydermic movements, Death Apophenia casts the listener down into an aphotic sunken abyss to be torn apart by immense tidal forces and crushed by catastrophic tectonic pressure. The band’s staple use of reverb to create immense, growling subterranean hallways reaches the pinnacle of its mastership, and so does their ability to construct humongously grotesque atmospheres that make the listener feel like they are being devoured by the earth and mummified alive. Tortured screams drenched in feedback and enormous and solemn sounding drum shells create a ritual-like telluric funeral march into the underworld, while slabs of inhumanly crushing and downtuned guitars bore a massive hole into the earth like molten lava melting the crust and sinking downward into the blackest chasm, evoking the sensation of an enormous, planet-sized horrendous burial taking place. Nothing can escape the sheer tonnage and crushing force of this immense sonic beast, and while Nekus are shown to be diligently delving further into the redefinition and delineation of their own personal idea of death metal as a monolithic and cinematic sentence...