Of Darkness

***Formed by veteran members of the Spanish extreme metal underground coming from bands like Graveyard, Teitanblood and Emanation (among others), Barcelona's abysmal black funeral doom miserists Of Darkness finally bring us their 2023 light-devouring full-length abomination on vinyl format for the first time ever. A colossal, subsonic deluge of agonizing misery churned from the wretched depths of a lightless abyss, “Missa Tridentina” stands regal and imposing as an absolute beast of 2023 extreme doom, possibly its greatest moment, beautifully adorned with atypical elements of neoclassical composition, chamber music, dark ambient, and ritualistic electronics to underline an impenetrable genesis of divergence. An experimental approach that has exalted the work's suffocating aura of surrealism and which embodies as a sentence of absolute oblivion, condemning the listener to a horrific disembodiment of perpetual aeonian torment. Few bands in recent times have had the vision and skill to harness the same realms of crushing, slow-moving terror we've seen masterfully captured in previous decades by the works of bands like Evoken, Nortt and particularly Tyranny, the former a band whom Of Darkness most resemble due to the unremitting darkness that burdens their aphotic craft. Yet the Spanish abyss-shapers seem to have taken this dismal, subterranean audial nightmare of theirs to an entire new realm of majesty, using experimental and improvisational ornaments assembled from unconventional approaches and instrumentations quite unprecedented for the style, to push their abysmal sonic magma into an even more blighted niche of extremity, rarely - if ever before - witnessed at such a terrifying and otherworldly state.