Review by Sonny for Fragments of Lost Memories - Divagate (2022)

Fragments of Lost Memories is a Japanese funeral doom project about whom very little is known. They may be a band or the product of a single musician, but Divagate is the third album released by the project in a little over a year, along with an eighteen-minute EP, so they are certainly in a very productive period currently. In common with both the previous albums Divagate contains four tracks, although this is considerably longer than the other two with all four tracks clocking in at over fifteen minutes each and the total runtime just short of 70 minutes. I have only heard the debut, Decadence, previously and found it to be a bit wanting, especially during the first two tracks, although the latter two showed some improvement. Luckily, Divagate is much more consistent and is a better album all round. The production is nice and clear and the music has a bit more heft than it did, certainly when compared to the first half of Decadence. I still wouldn't call it crushing in the manner of an Esoteric album, the second half of the title track for example is a very gentle piano-led piece that is particularly lightweight in comparison and, in truth, perhaps goes on a bit too long. 

The vocals are suitably Cthulhian with deeply growled, abyssal tones and are one of my favourite aspects of the album. The riffs are overlayed with some nice thin keyboards to add a layer of atmosphere but it doesn't at any point reach the levels of sheer weight and crushing intensity that the genre's best manage, feeling a bit more akin to gothic death doom for a fair bit of it's runtime. It also has a tendency to repetition, which I know may sound strange to those who may not have much experience of listening to funeral doom, but some of the music's motifs are stretched out just a little too long in my opinion.

Despite these reservations it is still a decent enough album and, like the debut, it improves during the second half, third track Nightmare having the heaviest main riff and closer, Mask, for me, being the standout track as it is the most satisfyingly funereal and complete of the four here. I'm sure FoLM may yet have a great album in them, but this still isn't it.