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Loss, Despond: Adding Brutality to Futility

Where Despond — the Profound Lore debut from Nashville, Tennessee, four-piece Loss – departs from most of the funeral doom genre is in its near-absolute lack of hope. Generally, there’s something in a funeral doom record that brings some element of beauty to its otherwise emotionally destroyed approach, an acoustic part, pretty interlude, whatever. Something for the listener to hang onto and have some feeling like it isn’t just all blackness and despair. Loss, on the other hand, are pure(st) misery. Even on the two-minute piano interlude title-track which comes on Despond’s second half, the notes are low and underscored by depressive drones. Even the ending of “Silent and Completely Overcome,” which features the only non-growled vocals on the record, is depressed beyond reproach. Listening to Loss is like being opened wide and having all your self-inflicted wretchedness stare you in the face. For just under 67 minutes straight. Maybe there’s something beautiful in that, in the rawness of it, the reality, but that doesn’t at all make it a pleasant experience.

And of course, that’s the point. You’re not supposed to put on Despond when you’re looking for windows-down-driving music. It’s not the soundtrack to your next sunny barbecue. Hell, I’m pretty sure if you played “Open Veins to a Curtain Closed,” which follows a brief spoken/guitar intro – also depressing – on a sunny day, even the sun would want to kill itself. I’m exaggerating the point, but guitarist/vocalist Mike Meacham’s low-gurgling death growl sits atop riffing so melancholic and slow that if you don’t ask yourself what the point of living is at least once over the course of the album, you might be a sociopath. There are breaks periodically from the titanic undulating of the guitar, but they offer little respite in terms of mood when, in the case of “Open Veins to a Curtain Closed,” they lead to a black metal-esque faster section, playing one side of the genre off another. Loss’ darkness is complete, and though it’s titled like a punk song, “Cut Up, Depressed and Alone” takes the striking lead lines of earlier Opeth and infects them with a bleakness that almost makes you forget the song is mid-paced and not the same grueling speed as its predecessor. As Despond progresses, it’s not so much engaging as it is overwhelming. Meacham – joined by guitarist Tim Lewis, bassist John Anderson and drummer Jay LeMaire – sticks to his growling even in the quiet part of “Cut Up, Depressed and Alone,” and the effect on the listener is the same as ever. Painful.

“Deprived of the Void” is three minutes of ultra-distorted noise that serves as a lead-in for “An Ill Body Seats My Sinking Sight,” which at 7:43 follows a similar course to some of the earlier material but features more prominent drumming from LeMaire. The tonal thickness purveyed by Anderson, Lewis and Meacham should go without saying in this genre, but as Despond progresses, the encompassing tonal weight of it plays a huge part in carrying across the emotional affect. “An Ill Body Seats My Sinking Sight” doesn’t take the same kind of break as a song like “Open Veins to a Curtain Closed,” which approaches the musing air of ‘90s European death/doom while also cutting out all the dramatic elements thereof, instead slowing to a crashing pace that would do Buried at Sea proud. As “Despond” opens the second half of the record, the temptation sinks in to take Loss in pieces, to break it up into multiple sessions, but I think that’s a testament to the band having accomplished what they set out to do. Despond isn’t supposed to be easy to listen to. It’s supposed to be hard, and miserable. Life is hard and miserable. If you want escapism, go listen to whatever pretty girl the pop overlords are exploiting this week. “Shallow Pulse,” which returns Despond to its woeful course has subtle pulsations from Anderson underlying the riffing of Lewis and Meacham. They stay deep in the mix, but show something of an experimental edge to Loss they haven’t yet displayed. Easy to miss the first time around, but interesting enough to keep an ear out for.

By now Loss have made their mission readily apparent. They’re out to make the most mournful, crushing album possible. The album’s last 25 minutes, then, can’t really do anything but build on that, beginning with the cumbersomely-titled “Conceptual Funeralism unto the Final Act (of Being).” I don’t know how many riffs the song actually has, but it breaks into halves, right around its midpoint (an appropriate place to break something in half), and gradually introduces a section of chanting vocals from Lewis behind Meacham’s growling, but like everything else in our pitiful lives, this too is fleeting, and “Conceptual Funeralism unto the Final Act (of Being)” lumbers deeper into the abyss in its final moments, leading to “Silent and Completely Overcome.” The aforementioned clean vocals, courtesy of Brett Campbell (Pallbearer), fittingly start the proceedings with “I do not remember a depression such as this.” Campbell leads the way through the opening movement, and Meacham joins soon with the lines, “With bleeding wrists and dying eyes/We should be grateful for pain/For it means we have at least one feeling left.” The song soon breaks into a more driving movement, Anderson using a running bass line to add activity to LeMaire’s drumming, so that it’s not such a drastic shift when the latter switches to blastbeats for a black metal excursion reminiscent of that earlier on Despond but ultimately better done. Campbell’s vocals return to top the fadeout after another three minutes or so of megadoom, and closer “The Irreparable Act” hinges on the regretful atmosphere the title suggests.

I’m reminded in the very first lines of the song of Amorphis’ title-track from their Tuonela record, but that’s bound to be coincidence, and Loss soon progress away from it. The guitar begins solo and gradually bass swells are worked in, but “The Irreparable Act” is almost halfway through by the time LeMaire kicks in on the drums, which sound more echoey and further back than anywhere else on the album. That adds an epic feel, but the drums don’t stick around. The guitars continue their run and an organ is brought on with some softly spoken vocals, and gradually, synth chanting rises in the mix as the guitars go away and closes the album. It’s brutal. Positively brutal. LossDespond succeeds because it is so fixed in its sorrow, and because there’s nothing along the course of the record either sonically or atmospherically that detracts from it. It’s the kind of album that feels like it’s filling your lungs while you listen, and naturally that’s not something that’ll appeal to everyone, but for those who can relate or for whom the theatricality in other death/doom is too much, it should find the sympathy it seems to so badly need.

Loss’ website

Profound Lore

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2 Responses to “Loss, Despond: Adding Brutality to Futility”

  1. Just Sayin says:

    Tim Lewis is the other guitarist and Jay LeMaire is their drummer…. Just sayin’.

  2. One of my favorite Funeral Doom releases of the last several years. Played Cut Up, Depressed and Alone on my pod this week.

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