Essenz
Mundus Numen

The second album we ever review from Svart Records is the second album by German black/doom metal band Essenz, a band that like the first Svart band happens to fall into the occult metal genre. But just by looking at everything about this band and Jess and the Ancient Ones which happens to be the first Svart band we reviewed and liked very much there is a big difference between them, the cover art is distinctly different the image and text about the bands seems very different so it is difficult to know wether or not we can expect another good album by Svart Records this time. They do have an impressive collection of positive press quotes in the promo package this band and maybe that is an indication of what to expect. But thinking a bit further it seems possible to find positive quotes of more or less any band these days so it might not say as much as you might believe at first. “With contrasting, decelerated phrases, bursts of transformation are drowned in ecstatic adrenalin. Essenz is the invocation of a metamorphosis, a stimulation of remote realms of the psyche that dwells on the borders of musical extremes and opens the gate to a deeper level.” at least that is what the biography says but I tend to wonder, blackish doom metal isn’t really my cup of tea as it usually tends to be intestinal consuming acids or dreary beyond belief or something similar. Although there are always exceptions.

The first thing striking me when listening to this album is the midtempo start, with a rather typical introducing riff it still sounded like something with a touch of energy and especially something with a really good production. And the production is a positive you will notice fast as the modern clean sound makes it easy to make out nuances and moods in the music without being disturbed by poor sound. After the midtempo start the tempo falls into a crawl and most of the album is played at a very low pace and the songs are long, the vocals silent and growling like a stricken Klingon warrior left to die in an abandoned battlefield. If that was the aim then the vocals are really successful, the variation is ranging from slow to even slower and from silent growls to even more silent growls, the songs feels more like a unit than a distinct collection of six songs that will end up setting you back over fifty minutes if you don’t like it and over 500 minutes if you don’t like it but have to review it.

Some reviewer said the band wasn’t playing it safe and took a lot of risks with their music, I wonder where he found those risks as the album I got sounds like a typical album of this kind of doom metal, the one that is aimed at the few thousand people in the world who gets something out of an exercise in monotony. Maybe the bravery can be said to be the fact that they turn their backs towards most music lovers and only aims to be liked by a small group of people of which some just are there for the image. Maybe the can be seen as brave for maintaining a sound that bores most to tears, I have no idea which but for me this band offers nothing, nothing at all. Sure the production is surprisingly good but so it is for many bands that are boring so that alone doesn’t make it worthwhile listening to. When listening to this I can’t help but thinking, why. Why do something that will bore most do death, that people will actually ask you to turn off if you should be playing it at a public location, and who does honestly really like listening to such music which greatest asset is the way it cures insomnia?

This is not an exception to the rule of black/doom metal being boring, it is just one more, it may have a white cover artwork but don’t let that fool you because underneath they are just the same as all the others. They make music that it mostly like the internal jokes at Hallowed no one but us writers understands them and the same is about this music only a small initiated group gets anything out of it while the rest of us just shrugs and thinks: what the hell? I called Storm Corrosion a yawn a few days ago, this is an even bigger yawn than that.

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