ninehertz

Cult of Occult, from Lyon, are old hands at this – they have been around for fifteen years now and I Have No Name is their fifth album, alongside a multitude of splits and EPs. The great thing is that they’re not just existing, they’re still growing, with this here and now the best they’ve sounded to these ears.

It is, as ever, the grimmest, most drawn out of doom. As I Have No Heart opens (the song names are fascinating linked to the album title), you’re instantly set fast in quicksand of the stodgiest, sluggish, stagnant sounds, an utterly barren landscape, lightless and funeral in approach. This is the world inhabited by their fellow souls of Blind Monarch and Coltsblood and the likes, and where few else dare. The shifts are subtle but feel significant in the otherwise glacial movement, the slight ripples that gradually arise by the ninth- or tenth-minute sound positively exotic, wonderful too.

They’re not simply playing the funeral doom numbers here, this is mastery of the approach, understanding how to manipulate the track lengths (4 of the 6 songs pass 13 minutes) and when its time to change up. This can be achieved through a manic barking vocal which wakes you from the enforced daze, bringing a sore head and barely veiled sense of threat. The vocals achieve a lot album-wide, sometimes stretching single words over epochs.

There are a couple of shorter tracks in the middle which bring creepy spoken word, distant noises of hounds or ghouls, a downcast funerary sombre instrumentation – all an effective portrayal of emotion and despondency. They don’t release the choke hold the album has on you. I Have No End suitably closes, bringing you in and flying by despite its near seventeen minutes, until a few from the close it collapses into an extreme drawn out crashing drum, vocal screeching, static blistered end.

This is how to create doom at its darkest, black-encrusted, extreme ends. It is wonderful to see a band so seasoned still perfecting and growing. They tour the UK in May, it may be an ordeal to witness, but an unmissable one.