Reviews list for Sinmara - Aphotic Womb (2014)

As I indicated in my forum post summarising the feature release this month, if I look at Sinmara’s discography, they have never quite topped their debut album. For me the capture of dissonance and atmosphere is rarely exemplified as well as it is across Aphotic Womb. What really stands out is that in creating such a vibrant sound, the band never once let much in the way of light into their songs. As the album title suggests, this is a creation grown in the darkest of wombs, utterly devoid of light. Taking all the best parts of Deathspell Omega, Carpe Noctem and Svartidauði the band make a real European mix of black metal sounds, incorporating elements that also remind me of Irish bm crew Slidhr and even Mgla in the album’s mellower transitions. For an album with so many moving parts it could easily sound like instruments are falling over one another as the layers overlap, yet there’s none of that cumbersome nature present on the album, in fact it is one of the most deftly played dissonant bm records of the 2010’s.

The band clearly take great pride in their attack on Aphotic Womb and there is a real sense of them owning the songs in the fullest sense of the term. Without creating any sense of restraint, they manage each of the tracks so diligently that it is hard not to see their pride in the delivery of their art. Album highlight for me is ‘Shattered Pillars’ with its riffs jittering across the track in glorious shimmering dissonance. In fact, some of the lyrics on here sum up the experience of the album perfectly:

“A cluster of storms

Breathing through wormhole mazes

Feeding gaping jaws the bitter waters of nausea

To harvest the foul seed and rape the crops of life

The demented ancestry of nebulae afar”

The album feels like that cluster of storms, with each track creating that maze as they are performed. There is something foul underlying in the music of Sinmara here, something wicked that barely makes the effort to stay hidden. That strong Ulcerate sound to the guitars on ‘Shattered Pillars’ is one of the reasons why I love this track. The New Zealand dissonant death metallers had only just released the might Vermis the year before Sinmara dropped their debut. Whilst percussively speaking there is a clear difference, the similarity in the guitar sound is undeniable.

Two instrumental tracks on your debut are a bold move, especially with one opening the record, yet Sinmara pull it off for me on both occasions. Working well on the two-disc vinyl version (I am guessing as I only have a digital version of the release) these tracks herald the arrival of each disc to the turntable with a sense of drama that never quite strays into the realm of epic. The harshness of Iceland’s landscape certainly comes through on Aphotic Womb, that unrelenting, heaving nature to the guitars sounds particularly symbolic in comparison. The album sounds like a vast and desolate landscape; possibly invoking images of a mass larger than its country of origin itself at times.

Something that I have realised over recent months is that I am not necessarily averse to dissonance in black and death metal per se, only that I have an issue with it when it is used as an implement of torture rather than as a musical device. Recent dalliances with the likes of Imperial Triumphant most definitely sit in the former category whilst the likes of Deathspell Omega's entire discography or Ulcerate's "Cutting the Throat of God" show how dissonance can be used as an atmospheric device like any other musical instrument. Of course I am aware that the really dissonant stuff is only an issue for me because of my own mental set-up and I do understand on an intellectual level why some bands deploy it as an artistic device to illustrate a point, I just am unable to enjoy it is all.

I was under the impression that I hadn't encountered these Icelanders before, but it appears that I had, awarding 2019's "Hvísl stjarnanna" a four-star rating despite not being able to recall it now. Luckily for me this month's feature from Sinmara and its disonnant approach very much belongs alongside the likes of Ulcerate and DsO and has been a wholly positive listening experience for me over the past week or so. One of the main reasons for this is that at its heart "Aphotic Womb" is a blistering and brooding black metal album. The dissonance of the tremolo riffing effectively lends the tracks a frosty iciness that elevates the savagery on display to a new level, in a way that a less atonal approach would struggle to replicate. This results in a bitter and venomous-sounding album that channels all the best that the icelandic black metal scene has to offer. We are not talking thin and raw black metal here, it has a full sound with the rhythm section playing an important part in providing both impetus and foundation whilst the guitarists unleash their six-stringed, dissonant sorcery. Vocalist Ólafur Guðjónsson has a harsh growling bark very much in the vein of DsO's Mikko Aspa, providing more proof of the french pioneers' significant influence on Sinmara. The overlying effect of the album is of a suffocating busyness that threatens to bury the listener under layers of ever-shifting sound, like being caught up in a blizzard, whipped into fury by bitingly cold, gale-force winds.

So, in conclusion, I want to heap bountiful praise upon "Aphotic Womb" for providing more fuel for the fire on which I must burn my preconceptions and for helping me to grow into enjoying a musical style I would once upon a time have really struggled with.