Ahab
Not only did German funeral doom metallers Ahab name themselves after the monomaniacal Captain in ‘Moby Dick’ but they draw heavily on the book for lyrical and thematic inspiration, and newest offering “The Divinity of Oceans” - the follow-up to 2006’s “The Call of the Wretched Sea” - is both a demonstrative testament to their obsession with all things oceanic and a continuation of their exploratory re-interpretation of Melville’s novel.
The opening melodic refrain, echoing, somber and oozing melancholy, ripples across the otherwise silence in slow-moving waves before downtuned guitars drag the listener into an unrelenting swirling blackness. At first this album glides along relatively inconspicuously, each track maintaining the same slow tempo set from its predecessor as it ebbs and flows between quivering dissonance and pockets of nothingness. The atmosphere builds upon layer after layer of ominous noise, but always with a restraint that is both methodical and deliberate, whilst vocal lines float from monastic-style chants and barely audible whispering to animalistic growls, never demanding too much attention, instead allowing each song to wash over the listener as a cohesively unified whole.
So far so good - it’s only a few tracks in you become consciously aware that something’s not quite right, that you definitely don’t feel that same as you did twenty minutes before, and in actual fact this album could very easily become the soundtrack to your suicide. Oh well, no use fighting it, not that you could even if you wanted to, and once that thought manifests in your mind your submersion into this environment of sensorial reduction - threatening and comforting in equal measure is complete. Your emotional malleability in Ahab’s hands is unnerving if for no other reason than its total unexpectedness, your damnation and salvation inseparable as you sink further and further into the darkness constructed especially for you.
Listening to this album in its entirety is like drowning in slow motion. It robs you of any vestige of happiness and replaces it with nothing. It’s not very often music this good can make you feel this bad, but fuck me if that’s not reason enough to give it a go I don’t know what is - challenging, unfaltering and depressingly brilliant.