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MONASTERIUM
Cold Are The Graves

Nine (2022)
Rating: 8.5/10

The third full-length album from this Polish brood casts great, cold shadows like majestic marble pillars constructed to support wondrous gold gilded ceilings.

Doom metal is a genre so rich and varied and Monasterium carves its own niche. This quartet does remind me of a Messiah Marcolin-led Candlemass only with extra iciness and glint, like a magnificent sword drawn from grey, ancient stone, mirroring life like a tapestry.

From the enigmatic cover art to the unfolding story within, Cold As The Graves never slumbers. Instead, through the pallid veil, there is a serenity and grandiose beauty as each track unfolds in epic fashion to reveal that the silky contours are in fact cold waves.

This feels like an emotive opus, commanded by the drifting vocals of Michał Strzelecki who confidently strides over opening track ‘The Stigmatic’, his clear booming tones never truly melancholic but more reflective.

Musically, the band is quite polished, slow but not draining or crushing. Instead, there is a sweeping, gliding and embracing aura due to Tomasz Gurgul’s velvet guitar tone enabling a song such as ‘Cimmeria’ to become wistful, elegant and yet boasting traditional metal in its trudge.

The clanking, and I mean clanking, bass of Filip Malinowski is a joy to behold, as is the sturdy drum work of Maciej Berniak, hence ‘Cimmeria’ being such a high point of this opus. But then there’s the all conquering, effortless trudge of ‘The Great Plague’ with its ethereal vapours. However, if you want a true account of doom then the whispering, creeping aesthetics of ‘Necronomicon’ should please. It’s the standout track here that shifts with bewitching fashion and yet remains elegantly foreboding.

The title track is equally suspenseful and haunting as the vocals tease us into the attic of that heavy yet stirring melody that somehow caresses. The Candlemass influence is there for all to hear, but any doom metal band that drenches itself in gothic fluidity is going to naturally conjure images of such titans that went before.

Cold Are The Graves is a wondrous journey through fantasy and frightmare, but never once is the listener dragged down. I kneel at its taken altar and sip the juices of its structure that age like fine wine.

Neil Arnold

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