Review by Sonny for Epitaphe - II (2022)

Epitaphe's debut album, I, was one of my favourites of 2019 and earned itself a five-star rating in the process. So we are now three long war- and pandemic-riddled years on and the French death doomers have unleashed their sophomore, II, upon us (with huge anticipation from me). Luckily for us all their lack of imagination in the titling of their albums is the only area where they are deficient on the imagination front.

Once more the band employ a symmetry in the tracklisting as they did on the debut with a couple of three-minute, gentle instrumental pieces book-ending three nineteen-minute epics. II seems to be primarily tagged as progressive metal, but I am not entirely sure if that tagging is appropriate, chiefly because I don't know if a huge percentage of usual progressive metal fans would love this. I think of it more as death or death doom metal release that has some progressive tendencies, particularly in the songwriting department, rather than an actual prog metal release. The progressiveness here doesn't amount to overindulgence or technical showiness that bedevils so many releases labelled as prog metal, but is merely a convenient label to describe the convoluted songwriting. One thing is for certain, Epitaphe certainly employ an impressive arsenal of extreme metal tropes to achieve those songwriting aims. Vocally they run the whole gamut from deep, rumbling death metal growls to clean doom metal singing to harsh sludgey howls, back to soft, clean vocals similar to Mikael Akerfeldt's cleans on a track like Face of Melinda. Musically there are brutal death metal riffs, thick, sometimes melodic doom metal riffs, subsonic OSDM riffing and a plethora of blastbeats. All this multitude of weapons in the Frenchmens' arsenal are skillfully deployed with some excellent songwriting that, despite all the twisting and turning, is still fundamentally heavy as fuck! These lengthy tracks are not the slow-build, increasingly formulaic musings of the atmo-sludge wave, but tracks that rise and fall less predictably, ranging from intense explosions of brutal death metal savagery to calm and serene pastoral sections and artfully displayed technical prowess.

II is not an album for the impatient metalhead, but is a technically impressive (in both songwriting and performance) release that does not skimp on sheer aggression and heaviness when the music calls for it, but also contains plenty of nuances and variety. More challenging extreme metal releases can often, by their nature, be quite alienating with a tendency towards dissonance and angular song structures, but Epitaphe, much like Mikael Akerfeldt's Opeth before them, produce complex and challenging music that doesn't alienate the listener, but rather entrances and mesmerises them. This latest album should definitely cement Epitaphe's reputation as a metal band of immense ability and one of which to take note.