Monarch! / Mer Morte

Crucial Blast

First appearing as a limited-edition LP on the Spanish label Throne Records in 2008, Monarch!'s Mer Morte is now available on CD and digital download as a single unbroken 34-minute sludge-and-feedback feast. Sprawling out further into the dismal void in which these French doom junkies have lurked for the past six years, Mer Morte plumbs massive blackened tarpits of low-end riffage and stretches sheets of gluey feedback into monolithic slabs of sound--a grim, glacial ultra-doom that crawls at a saurian sub-tempo. The gaunt and ghostly vocalizations of Emilie Bresson materialize across the spatial doomscape as distant ululating wails, breathy whispers and putrid death shrieks. This disc captures Monarch! at their most formless and distended, with long droning buzz sections where the band collapses into waves of pure amp-rumble, howling feedback drone, and eerie tectonic melodies. The CD is beautifully packaged in an offset-printed four-panel gatefold constructed by Stumptown Printers, with gold metallic ink on a black jacket.

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