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BLIND MONARCH
The Dead Replenish The Earth

Dry Cough / Heavenly Vault / minoRobscuR (2024)
Rating: 8.5/10

Five years after their colossal What Is Imposed Must Be Endured debut album, Sheffield doom sluggers Blind Monarch ooze from the cracks of South Yorkshire with another gruelling slab of sludge.

Four gargantuan cuts and a total duration of 43 minutes, The Dead Replenish The Earth is that sodden compost heap you forgot all about that’s been festering away in the garden for the last half a decade. Consisting of mushy rotten apples, stinking mulch, putrid vegetable remains, manure and decomposed limbs, the Blind Monarch silt is a seething, sneering and steaming dump of blackened horror led by the scathing vocals of Tom Blyth.

This is the sort of leakage that conjures up the likes of Burning Witch as the 13 minute ‘Other Faces’ creeps down your hallway like a carpet of liquefied soot. Dragging and harrowing, yet it’s impossible to categorise this as funeral doom because of its overwhelming thickness as a slithering entity. Tom Blyth does drift into a more guttural bellow, suggesting a more commanding presence within the soupy oil slick riffs of Adam Blyth who tests our patience with some incredible yet drowning slurry.

Bassist Paul Hubbard and drummer Sam Elsom provide archaic sounds akin to an army of orcs toiling away in the bowels of fiery Mordor. With each resonating thud the pair tar the ears in an engulfing syrup as the ten minute ‘Diminishing’ primitively groans and heaves to its own despairing demise. Tom Blyth yaps and pleas like a quicksand victim taking his last sickening breath before the percussive thuds chime like some great tolling bell counting down the end of days.

The title track is as equally trying with its monolithic clay-caked yawning horror. Around the four minute mark the guttural bellows emerge over a more standard death-doom riff but by this point you’re so bereft that any pin prick of light is all you can hope for amidst the cascading silt.

Closing number ‘All Shall Pass Away’ seems to take an age to rumble before the grit of black rain discharges itself from humid glassy rocks. The drums act as primordial yet sporadic thunder claps within the sediment of aching chords. I’m inconsolable after such a journey, joining the clan for one last ritualistic trip into the dispirited and grief-stricken realm.

This is trying, testing, laborious and arduous; a nightmare through swamps of black treacle and sodden heartache that a live show may prove to be too much for some.

Neil Arnold

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