Monarch! [2008] Mer Morte

First appearing as a limited edition LP on the Spanish label Throne Records in 2008, Monarch's Mer Morte is now made available on cd and digital as a single unbroken thirty-four minute sludge-and-feedback feast that sprawls out further into the dismal black void that these French doom junkies have been lurking in for the past six years. As with previous releases, Monarch move through massive blackened tarpits of low-end riffage and sheets of gluey feedback that are stretched out into monolithic slabs of sound, a grim, glacial ultra-doom that crawls at a saurian sub-tempo. And vocalist Emilie sounds as gaunt and ghostly as ever, her vocalizations materializing across the spatial doomscape as distant ululating wails, breathy whispers, and putrid death shrieks. At the same time, this disc captures the band at their most formless and distended, with long sections of droning buzz where the band collapses into waves of pure amp-rumble and minimalist percussion, smoldering black clouds of ghostly cooing vocals and howling feedback drone, and eerie tectonic melodies... the cd release of Mer Morte is beautifully packaged in an offset-printed four-panel gatefold constructed by Stumptown Printers, with gold metallic ink on a black jacket.