Serpent of Old releases its debut album.
Formed in Turkey, the band composed of Ozan Gürbüz (vocals), Atakan Güclü (guitar), Doga Tarhan (guitar), Yalaz Öner (bass) and Kerem Kaan (drums) have signed to Transcending Obscurity Records to unveil Ensemble Under the Dark Sun.
The band open their album with The Sin Before The Great Sin, a composition that immediately reveals its heavy dissonance with a rather slow introduction, followed by a livelier but equally suffocating acceleration. The approach becomes more raw, welcoming aggressive vocal parts as well as piercing harmonics carrying us through Unsaturated Hunger and Esoteric Lust, a more massive and aggressive track. The sound remains as heavy and cloudy as ever, taking advantage of the addition of screams to multiply the waves of sonic chaos tenfold, sometimes offering more complex explosions before slowing down again on The Fall, which skilfully places unhealthy Doom influences over which the leads develop their hazy tones. Once again, the band’s dark veil is applied to increase the rage and the most devastating influences, while keeping the haunting patterns and visceral screams before a short lull, followed by the return of the regular rhythm and Virtue of the Devil in His Loins, a strange and mysterious interlude beginning by hypnotizing us before letting a saturated ritualistic sound lead us into From the Impending Dusk. The composition exploits its many influences to give its sound mass some rhythm, injecting mystical choirs and jerky accelerations into its heavy basis before letting Idiosyncrasy, a relatively short track (almost five minutes), close the album with an abrasive mix which remains torn between some very vivid parts and others that are much more airy, even melancholic.
Serpent of Old‘s secret lies in their mastery of rich, contrasted sonorities between raw violence and dissonant atmosphere. Ensemble Under the Dark Sun is far from accessible, but the album will reveal itself to the most curious.
85/100