Review: Blind Monarch ‘The Dead Replenish The Earth’

After the great legend of recording hardship that lay behind Blind Monarch’s debut record, What Is Imposed Must Be Endured, it seemed strange that The Dead Replenish The Earth should land in the middle of August. And yet, there is always somewhere bleak enough to listen to doom if you look hard enough.

Not far from me, there is an old section of disused railway line tunnel, always dark, and dripping, and chill. The fact that I once spent a day leading ‘spooky Halloween walks’ through it with the Ghostbusters theme playing on a loop does somewhat diminish the horror of it for me, but nevertheless, it is a suitable place for summer grimdooming.

So thence did I drag my weary feet, remembering the sullen slog across drear marshes (in a good way) that was their first record. It is at once clear that Blind Monarch have taken no radical turns from that path, working still with leaden riffing which calls to all that is extreme and deathly in the murky sphere of sludge and doom.

While these terms are often used somewhat interchangeably despite being quite distinct, this is an example of a band leaning towards that space where Burning Witch, and the most metallic of sludge bands, find common ground with doom proper, as shown by a willingness to employ epic (slow) guitar solos and imagery of cursed kings lamenting from their burial mounds. If that sounds reductive, it is – Blind Monarch have a sound, it is slow, and extreme, with huge tones and charred vocals, but they also have an idea and have worked it into a rich and heady piece of music.

it is slow, and extreme, with huge tones and charred vocals…

Thematically, The Dead Replenish The Earth deals with loss, death and depression. And yet as couched in the title, this does not make for an entirely monochrome effect. Lyrics are by reason of genre, often somewhat opaque, although the sprechgesang allows us to read some radical self-affirmation in lines such as ‘I’ve lived my life without a care / And I don’t have a god so I don’t have a prayer / I see myself’. Although we may be bound into the ‘indifferent vacuum of night’ there is something that burns – ‘a blaze escaped its bonds’. An ambiguous fire: Promethean light of Lucifer but also the fire that burns us to ash, returns us to the cold earth.

This is the decisive tension that pushes our doom-disciple hands high, fingers clawed, and with faces gurning in ecstatic despair cry anguish and defiance to the narrow ceilings of stale-aired rooms. A ritual release that should be in a bleak moorland and forest clearing confined to licensed corners of our towns and cities are the small fires of rebellion we carry with us.

Label: Dry Cough Records | Heavenly Vault | minoRobscuR
Band Links: Facebook | Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram

Scribed by: Harry Holmes