Cenotaph - The black oceans of death metal

Prologue

In the first half of the Eighties, as Mexican youth culture was slowly becoming Americanized, interesting developments were also taking place on the musical front. While in the metal scene it was initially Judas Priest and Scorpions who served as role models, little by little, as rebellion against traditional values grew more radical, it was the extremism of the stars and stripes that took hold in fans' hearts, especially after the release, in 1986, of the epoch-making "Reign In Blood" by Slayer. The most important hub for the spread of this new movement was, naturally, the vast metropolitan sprawl of Mexico City, where it wasn't hard to run into crowds of metaleros dressed in ripped jeans and t-shirts bearing the logos or names of their favorite bands. Unlike other scenes, however, the Mexican one gradually leaned toward left-wing politics, with denunciations of American imperialism, accusations against the government's inertia, and condemnations of the torture inflicted on migrants caught crossing the border. Thanks to tape-trading (the exchange of recorded cassettes among fans), many albums became available to the ever-growing number of kids in love with metal.

In this rather heated atmosphere, which also saw the shutting down of some fanzines and other forms of censorship, more or less invasive, the compilation Escuadrón Metálico – Proyecto Uno, launched on the initiative of Arturo Hernandez Huizar, singer of Luzbel, revealed an early face of Mexican metal, featuring tracks by Gehenna, Aspid, Z, Khafra and Ramses. The fuse had been lit. And so, even without proper technical know-how, many kids threw themselves into the fray, forming bands and recording demos. In 1988 came the turn of Damned Cross, formed by Daniel Corchado (vocals, bass), Guillermo Hérnadez (guitar) and Oscar Clorio (drums). Determined to test themselves with a mix of death-metal, grind and obscene lyrics, the three managed to record a demo, Excretion Of Infected Corpses, not exactly thrilling, but still capable of earning good feedback... Another demo, Soldiers Of Wotan, was recorded with a different line-up and only circulated within a small circle of friends. Having shelved the old moniker and adopted the more evocative one of Cenotaph, the band stepped up rehearsals, trying to sharpen their instrumental technique as much as possible. Their first effort was the demo Rise of Excruciation, a mysterious object for many years, until Dahmer Productions reissued it in 2003. It's the snapshot of a band armed with nothing but a four-track recorder and plenty of goodwill, but the results are still not entirely convincing, not least because, needless to say, the recording quality isn't exactly top-notch. Shortly after, though, Brazil's Distorted Harmony Records took notice of them and had them record the 7" Tenebrous Apparitions, containing two monstrous, putrid compositions, amid subsonic bass rumbles, down-tuned guitars with a sludge-like touch, and a cavernous voice that's truly frightening (just listen to "Larvs of Subconscious" to believe it...).

It's 1990, and the line-up now reads: Guillermo Delgado (guitar), Oscar Clorio (drums), Gustavo (guitar) and Daniel Corchado (vocals, bass, guitar).

“Back then – Oscar Clorio recalls – we were heavily influenced by bands like Xysma, Carcass, Immolation, Nihilist, Napalm Death and others. We wanted to play the heaviest, most brutal music ever. Sure, the sound of that first 7" of ours wasn't much to speak of, but we were still cutting our teeth.”

The 7" by The Eternal Disgrace (with César Sánchez in place of Gustavo), another single put out by LA's Baphomet Records, is crude, cavernous death metal, with Corchado's vocals recalling Antti Boman of Demilich, a band that in that same year, 1991, released its first demo, “Regurgitation of Blood”. Strictly for the strongest of stomachs, in other words. Having been contacted by Germany's M.B.R. Records, the band then recorded a brand-new track, “Evoked Doom”, destined for the international compilation Pantalgia, which also featured, among others, Disembowelment, Pan-Thy-Monium, Therion and God Macabre.

Dark reflections on pain

1992 was the turning-point year for Cenotaph. Under the wing of Horus Productions, they recorded and released one of the most important albums of the Mexican scene, The Gloomy Reflection Of Our Hidden Sorrows (9 tracks; 44:42), with a gorgeous cover painted by Ryszard Wojtynski. The band had finally managed to become one of the most brutal and heaviest on the planet, helped along by a more professional production job (Hans Mues). Setting aside their old “gore” lyrics, they turned to existentialist themes, while the sound morphed into a kind of hyperspace sludge death-doom, piling boundless grandiosity onto what their countrymen Shub-Niggurath had already proposed a couple of years earlier on the “Horror Creatures” tape. Even at the time, the record offered something close to unique, blending furious detonations with acoustic inserts, lethal convulsions with evocative passages, murky horror visions with galactic flights. The band, however, wasn't satisfied with the first round of recording sessions, determined as they were to achieve a sound dominated by low frequencies and a suffocating atmosphere.

Announced by a few solemn keyboard notes (played by Mues himself) and shaken by the first mighty death-doom blasts, “Requiem for a Soul Request” is the perfect instrumental to kick off the journey, whose first, vigorous stop is “Ashes in the Rain”, the manifesto track of this new direction, lyrically too: ⟦Q1⟧. The monumental scale of it all is eaten away by gorgeous guitar inserts, suspended between slimy melancholy and bristling delirium, blending perfectly with the suffocating weave laid down by the rhythm section. The colossal blast-beats, Corchado's guttural vocals, the crystalline melodic twists, the elastic bass lines and the foul electric cobwebs spun by the two guitars are the building blocks around which the mighty broodings of “…a Red Sky” revolve, along with the more polished versions of “Evoked Doom” and “Repulsive Odor of Decomposition” (both reaching for titanic symphonism) and the occult fractures and devastating doom plunges of “Tenebrous Apparitions” (one of the most dynamic moments on the tracklist). “The Spiritless One” and “Infinite Meditation of an Uncertain Existence” then bring in bizarre keyboard intrusions, while “In The Cosmic Solitude” achieves the most successful synthesis of all, delivering one of the record's most intense moments: an acoustic intro wrapped in sidereal winds, a sharp guitar epic as a sparkling prelude, a steamrolling gallop and clearings of torrential malice.

The whole album is a hymn to the power of doom reread through the inhuman lens of death metal. Somewhere between the icy apocalypses of Winter's “Into Darkness” and the colossal evocations of Esoteric (who would debut just a year later, and who, in all likelihood, gave this record more than one spin…), Cenotaph planted a crucial seed for understanding how some of the era's most terrifying sounds would go on to develop.

The album also allowed Cenotaph to level up, becoming a cult object for fans of the most extreme metal. In the meantime, they had the honor of sharing stages with some of the most acclaimed bands of the era (Carcass, Incantation, Autopsy), though cracks began to show, so much so that, before the year was out, Corchado left to go on and found another pillar of Mexican death metal: The Chasm.

“Around that time – Corchado recalls – Cenotaph was pushing toward a very extreme sound, but I wanted to experiment with death metal that was even darker and, above all, stranger. I started putting material together, meaning to bring it to the rest of the band, but when I realized I wasn't getting much support, I decided to leave and start a band of my own.”

Il mare è un antico idioma che non riesco a decifrare (Jorge Luis Borges)

With Corchado's contribution gone, the rest of the crew felt lost, but Clorio, after a period of reflection, set things right, bringing in bassist Fernando Garcilazo (formerly of Allister), singer Edgardo González (fresh off a demo with Foeticide) and guitarist Julio Viterbo, the true mastermind behind Shub-Niggurath, another local legend. Strange but true: right after Corchado's departure, the band started writing material that was completely different from what had appeared on the first album. A demo was recorded in a single night to circulate among various labels. In the end, Dutch label Cyber Music came calling, and in July 1994 Riding Our Black Oceans was released (9 tracks; 49:18), an album that marked a clean break from everything the band had produced up to that point. Having abandoned the gruesome visions of the past, Cenotaph focused on far more adventurous songwriting and a relatively more polished sound, able to weave a strong melodic thread into structures that were intricate and never predictable.

Whenever this record comes up, the old story about the influence of the Scandinavian “melodic” scene inevitably resurfaces. For many, it's simply unthinkable that, in one way or another, while writing and recording these songs, Cenotaph hadn't at least caught a passing listen of records like At The Gates' “The Red in the Sky Is Ours” and “With Fear I Kiss the Burning Darkness”, or the early output of In Flames or Sentenced. And yet, while not denying a certain influence, Clorio has always stressed the absolute originality of their sound: “The only thing we had in common with those bands was wanting to focus on more complex arrangements, and also working in riffs with a more overtly heavy-metal flavor, even if always within an ‘extreme' context. But the real architects of the sound of that second album of ours were us and us alone…”

However one wants to look at it, the fact remains that Riding Our Black Oceans, once properly digested, proves to be on a whole different level — in originality, in overall quality and in the complexity of its songs — compared to the Scandinavian models, establishing itself as the absolute masterpiece of the “melodic” side of death metal. Clorio and company arrived in the arms of melody mainly by listening to heavy doses of Iron Maiden, though it's not out of the question that Corchado had left behind more than a passing influence before seeking his fortune elsewhere, as suggested by the demo “Awaiting the Day of Liberation” or the official debut under the name The Chasm, “Procreation of the Inner Temple”, released in '93 and '94 respectively, both of which, in any case, showed a less technical framework and a greater taste for bizarre solutions.

As for the guitar sound (whose tremolo lines sit somewhere between black metal progressions – Burzum was, around that time, among their favorite listening – and those of Swedish melodeath), they made a specific request to producer Julio Sanchez: “We wanted the guitars to sound crunchier, so we asked him to think of Master Of Puppets by Metallica.” They also decided not to mix or master the album, and to use fully analog gear, aiming for a recording as true to the “facts” as possible. All these factors contributed to a uniquely rendered sound, built on these pillars: the furiously expressive, anti-technical singing of Edgardo González, at times truly harrowing in his attempt to channel “into” his voice the unsettling undercurrent lurking behind his lyrics; the guitar work of Viterbo, at once elastic and intricate, alternating insidious yet highly effective riffs with gorgeous melodic forays, weaving his way among the various harmonic peaks in order to open up a wider tonal space (by contrast, the often more structured contribution of César Sánchez creates a structural offset into which Fernando Garcilazo's throbbing bass lines slot in); and finally, Clorio's extremely dynamic drumming, which lends everything a sense of swirling spatiality, underscoring the various instrumental passages with elegant, muscular patterns.

A masterpiece of the Mexican extreme metal scene and arguably the high point of melodic death metal as a whole, Riding Our Black Oceans (recorded at OIGO studios in Guadalajara) is an album that strikes you above all for its passionate charge, spread almost evenly across its scant fifty minutes, to the point that it's practically impossible to pinpoint a single superfluous passage, a single dip in quality. That passionate charge is further heightened by González's choice to continue, lyrically, along the existentialist lines of The Gloomy Reflection Of Our Hidden Sorrows, albeit opting for a more “human” and less “cosmic” perspective. The “black oceans” of the title should therefore be read on a symbolic level, standing for the vast expanses of human interiority which, being impenetrable, can at most be “sailed across”, but never truly penetrated. If plunging into the depths of the soul's ocean is all but impossible, all that's left is to navigate its vast expanses, far and wide.

The album opens with spoken-word verses set inside a mysterious landscape where a lost arpeggio and a distant hiss echo: ⟦Q2⟧. A recitation that explodes into a searing death/thrash blaze, a prelude to the first panel of this new chapter, where the material has grown so malleable as to take on progressive overtones. The break from any possible models is already sharp, absolute, intense. A majestic, magnetic riff opens “Severance”, escorted by the relentless, jagged guitar textures all the way to a wrenching collapse (⟦Q3⟧), where the words crumple up like scorched sheets of paper, allowing the music to regroup around a second section in which agile drum acrobatics hold the center of gravity against Viterbo's recurring melodic flights, which, climb after climb, drag everything toward an epic finale. The opening of “Grief To Obscuro” is a punch to the face, and the whole track is a dizzying chase of trilling, concentric whirlwinds, dramatic peaks, convulsive tears and furious progressions. “Macabre Locus Celesta”, on the other hand, shows further complications right from its opening, with a panoramic bridge flipping the first part into a scorching, superhuman delirium (⟦Q4⟧), itself overtaken by an ever more tangled flood of instrumental exchanges. Then comes the detonation in projection, with which González rallies the troops before the final turn. “Among The Abrupt” carries on along this same lashing path of atonement, with a heart-pounding first part (where technical structure, progressive instinct and barbaric fury merge inescapably) and a second part that slides into an almost doom-like deceleration, echoing the metaphysical catastrophes of the first album (“In this gloomy dream my hidden sorrows / will stay behind my eyes for the existence / and for the eternity they will remain mine”) and ending with a tail as dry and sharp as a point-blank spit.

The human dimension of pain, in any case, grows ever narrower, incapable of containing the tragic tension of these songs, to the point that the first verse of "Infinitum Valet" (“Be alone and contemplating the meditation / in a spiritual space, where all is in order / the cosmicism of this enigma dances for me / in this existence of my being that is in disorder”) poses the question of that enigma once again from a cosmic angle, while the music takes on an almost symphonic breadth, in a succession of swelling apotheoses and brutalist regurgitations. The acoustic interlude, with the martial coda of "The Silence Of Our Black Oceans", sets up the closing one-two punch. From its ferocious, galloping opening attack, "Soul Profundis" promises well-placed blows, keeping an enviably sharp edge, with a vaguely mariachi insert (!) that suddenly pops up to refuel the combative drive of these metaleros in a state of grace, triumphant straight-ahead runs and a feverish breaking point (“I implore with fear my sword that is hate / with purgatory emotional sensibility / I ride in this night of the stars / fighting for the domination of my own / light of darkness / trying to catch the wind in my fist”) that, around the fourth minute, seems to want to condense all the torments of the record. Probably the masterpiece within the masterpiece... Along "Ectasia Tenebrae", on the other hand, introduced by an Egyptian prologue that might bring to mind Nile or Lykathea Aflame (but a few years ahead of them...), this melodic death-thrash completes its transfiguration into a fusion of pounding scalar patterns and blood-soaked sublimations in search of the ultimate climax. The guitars launch into swift unison runs, unleashing flocks of harmonics, continuing to mark out a hyperbolic torment that the final, pained chords seem to want to extinguish once and for all.

Few, at the time of the terrifying visions of Tenebrous Apparitions, would have bet on Cenotaph's ability to make a record capable of sounding sophisticated and brutal, melodic and progressive all at once, projecting death metal toward new dimensions of creativity. And, for that matter, very few were those who, in that summer of 1994, realized the greatness of Riding Our Black Oceans, whose nine tracks still manage to sound elusive and enigmatic to this day.  

Rites and sagas, war and death

With the same line-up, they also recorded Epic Rites: 9 Epic Tales & Death Rites (9 tracks; 43.50), released in 1996 by the Mexican label Oz Productions. The record holds up well, showing relatively more straightforward songwriting, but still charged with genuine passion. The sudden shifts between acoustic passages and electric lashings remain, here and there some keyboard parts pop up (handled by a certain Cabrito), while Gonzalez's voice has become slightly more restrained. As for Clorio, his drumming seems less sharp, while Viterbo grinds out riff after riff with his usual fervor.

The dynamics of tracks such as "Crying Frost", "Lorn Ends" and "Navegate" still pivot on tortuous passages, reflective interludes and hammering progressions, with more pronounced complications in "Toward The Umbra". Traces of the previous album's dramatic pathos, on the other hand, materialize with more vigorous consistency in "As The Darkness Borns" and "Angered Tongues".

While not reaching the creative peaks of its predecessor, Epic Rites still received a more favorable response, to the point that the band was called to open for Slayer during their Mexican tour. A bootleg with extremely poor-quality live recordings (The Last Epic Age) was also put on the market.

It's at this stage, however, that the problems begin. Gonzalez seeks better fortune in the United States, though without leaving the band, while Viterbo, after a period of uncertainty, will become a permanent member of Chasm. In the end, Clorio will be forced to recruit a new guitarist (Samuel Ocadiz, already of Foeticide and The Suffering) and a new bassist (newcomer Eduardo Guevara) to keep the band alive. The period of crisis thus turns into a new adventure, culminating in 2002 with the release of Saga Bélica (8 tracks; 38.10), again on Oz Productions. At the time, here's how Clorio put it: "We recorded it in Germany, with Harris Johns, and, to be honest, it's a good record. Probably a lot of our fans will be thrown off by the new sound, which is less complex and a bit more brutal, but it's still a Cenotaph record. The recording quality isn't bad either, although I think the drum sound could have been improved, as it ended up being a bit too raw. In any case, we recorded this record first and foremost for ourselves, and it will probably be the last". Clorio was telling the truth, because with Saga Bélica the adventure came to an end. As for the record, it is without doubt the weakest work of their career, with tracks of relentless, uncompromising thrash-death that lack compositional depth, unable to convey that sense of emotional disorientation that Epic Rites, in one way or another, still managed to capture. It is, in any case, a record that the casual listener could enjoy without any trouble, perhaps mistaking the band for just another blind-brutality machine, won over by the steamrolling cadences of tracks such as "Necrommandments", the title track, or "Owners Of Torment". Tracks that don't have an ounce of the expressive power of the gems on Riding Our Black Oceans.

(28/07/2013)

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