Review by Vinny 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.