DROWN - Subaqueous

This weight, incomprehensible

Pulls everything into the mouth

Of Father Subaqueous

Deeper still we go

I drown

If your idea of music is closer to a painful introspective session than to a soundtrack for leisurely moments, you should definitely make a note of the name Markov Soroka. The Ukrainian, who works solo, has already shown off his visionary and disturbing grandeur with the unpronounceable project Tchornobog, a monstrous concentrate of death metal steeped in Lovecraftian cosmic horror. Not content with having debuted that project with an opening track running over twenty minutes, plus other torrential, tentacular sonic behemoths that split eardrums and torment the heart, since way back in 2012 he's also been active with the funeral doom metal project Slow, later renamed with the more original Drown in 2018.

As the genre tag and chosen moniker suggest, the debut album, "Unsleep" (2014) - released under the name Slow and then in 2018 as Drown - is a sheer dive into the abyss. The five tracks make up a desperate venture to the edges of life, in a slow, insistent march that, no small feat, never flattens into monotony, thanks in part to psychedelic inlays and death-metal blasts. For someone like Soroka, though, those first 47 minutes of music sound unusually restrained, both in form and length. In 2017 Slow also released an EP, "Mother Cetacean", namely a twenty-minute track never reissued by Drown until now, finally available on this new album. The album at hand, "Subaqueous", makes up for the relative restraint of "Unsleep", adding to the aforementioned "Mother Cetacean" the previously unreleased "Father Subaqueous", which runs just past 21 minutes. These are two similar and complementary compositions, as their names suggest, which exalt atmospheric allure without shying away from physical impact.

The first track, which fans (?) will already know, plunges into the blackest sea to draw from it a spectral, solemn guitar melody, rendered lugubrious and majestic by the growl. After 8 minutes the liturgy scatters, an anxious, submarine tension echoes, a deep melancholy reverberates. Then the tide swells the sonic surge again, recalling the solemn opening melody, until it surges into a death-doom climax that frays the sonic matter down to a mournful guitar music box and then a dirge for strings.

The second composition, the only one that's genuinely unreleased, is closer to the Tchornobog project, opening with a whirlpool of half-time death-metal anguish, tempered into an atmospheric, anguished, chamber-like doom metal, well suited as a prelude to a long stretch of drips, sighs, and dark-ambient-tinged drones. Once the death-doom fury resumes, now more epic than tormented, more martial than introspective, Soroka builds us a vertigo in which the arrangement is left to coil into a layering of melodic lines and cavernous vocals. The final movement is a weeping of strings, an anxiety of guitars, a torment of voice that finds, in the feral, nocturnal instrumental closing passage, the sonic equivalent of the desperate attempt to surface, with one's last strength, of someone fighting not to drown.

As an uncompromising musician, Soroka grants the listener no liberating final breath. The two albums released as Drown are a journey held underwater, which certainly demand the right frame of mind. It's a listen that will bring to mind, for music lovers, Anathema, Cathedral, My Dying Bride, Opeth and Esoteric, without reducing the matter to mere imitation. Here, with two extended compositions, there's room to leave the water's surface behind and dive into the trench, where in superhuman darkness swim the most human of fears.

But be warned: 6 years have passed since the plunge, but it's still not time to surface - we must inexorably keep on drowning.

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11/04/2020