Review: Epitaphe - II
French progressive death doom metal acts Epitaphe return with new album is called II, this album will be released by Aesthetic Death on April 11th, 2022.
This album opens with Sycomore, a beautiful track with a smooth acoustic guitar introduction that provides serenity that permeates the heart and mind and carries an indulgent melancholy feel, before Celestial crashes with the roar of a thunderous death metal storm that crashes against the thick walls that built from the dense and fast guitar riff construction but sounds epic and dark, while the mix of varied vocals evokes the impression of a scary horror with a very gripping atmosphere. This band managed to weave all the beauty, fear, and horror that merged into a very unique death metal composition with a strong embrace of doom metal and a solid progressive foundation, Its changing tempo makes this song difficult to predict where it is going, sometimes it sounds soft and slow with a soothing melody accompaniment and sometimes it explodes at a very aggressive veloxity that makes us just gawking at this crazy performance, then a very worrying part appears as our introduction to the next track Melancholia, a song that has varying beats, is heavier and more violent in structure with drums hitting our eardrums all around. The song centers on its superb guitar parts, which feature scale shifts that difficult-to-digest . The mesmerizing melodies blend together with the melancholic and dramatic parts that really poison my mind that executed over the worrying dissonance, then this song offers a long break with soothing guitar strums and some amazing clean vocals, before the nuances returns to scary when the cruel side of the song culminates again with bursts of unsettling dissonance followed by a menacing and gruesome melody and moves onward to deeper passages with more haunting fear until the end with voices that lead us into a deep void. Insignificant, a song that begins with a blast of epic melody and a frosty atmosphere, then the song moves through to the heavy part with gruesome vocals and displays a strong progressive side that combined with a spicy and lilting melody that continues to flare with horrible power, while its slashing guitar solos come to rip our minds apart with a jolting and haunting melody that anchors to the perverted abyss filled with disturbing noises, before Merging Within Nothingness arrives to close this album with its somber and drowning melodic twist that throws us even more in a gripping and emptiness dimension.
II is a beautiful work and an album that must be consumed in its entirety to get the thrill of the full journey in it. This isn't just a collection of tracks, but it's an incredibly conceptualized album. It's a smooth and enigmatic journey, where they showcase a beautiful blend of progressive death metal with doom metal that fuses an epic, melancholic, and haunting melody, as well as displaying some unsettling dissonance that is executed very well in the composition and craftsmanship of each member. The songwriting is unique and brilliant with a very smooth production. An album that evokes passion, emotion, and anger at the same time. You should check out this album, because it's a very interesting and different stuff.