Mork - Dypet (2023)^{Release ID: 43586}

Bought this whilst drunk on the internet one night and so held little promise for it. I liked Katedralen from a couple of years back though so made the impulse buy based on that alone I guess. Listening through to Dypet, you get pretty much what you had on the 2021 release. As the album artwork suggests, this is a suitably cold affair, utilising the minimal approach to bm that we would all expect it to well. Full of sublimely drab melodicism, this is an album that revels in its own ravishing grimness. Which I do not mind of course, this accessibility coupled with some of the more dismal tropes I look for in my bm makes for a refreshing switch up from standard icy cold blasting that I find spinning on my turntable more often than not.

In fact, Dypet has an almost heavy metal undertone to parts of it. The riffs overall are relatively clean and as such make the transitions clearer which makes it very easy to connect with the record. Whether you are going from the beginning or jumping into a track on a playlist it is not hard to find parts of Dypet ringing around your head after just a few minutes of sampling its content. Still more or less exclusive performed by Thomas Eriksen himself (Hjelvik's Erlend Hjelvik does vocals on Høye murer), this is consistently played stuff that never strays into the realm of outstanding but needs no level of exceptional musicianship to shine.

That's not say there are not moments of unexpected sounds. The synth/organ on closing track Tilbake til opprinnelsen add a surreal dimension to proceedings to keep things interesting to the very end of the record. Then with some element of an anti-climax, Dypet is done with. No extended outro, no epic build to end, just a slight crescendo of a riff to end the album on the note of consistency that thrives throughout. So, for a drunken purchase, this proved wiser than you may have first thought. It holds its own against the previous release if not ever really topping it but still does a perfectly respectable job in the process.