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Released on September 18, 2015 via Dark Descent Records
Tyranny’s Aeons In Tectonic Interment is painted in pretty consistently grey tones throughout, with some nice details added here and there, allowing pleasingly immersive wallowing in the sound of a band that haven’t been heard from on record for a decade. It’s a solid return for the funeral doom titans.
The album opens with a creaking door, lurching-down-the-corridor, clanking chains set-up, and then we’re quickly (remarkably quickly, given this is Tyranny) into the deep croak and crushing slow cymbal crashes that mark their style. In addition, there’s a great hovering-wavering guitar line that adds a sort of imperious angry wizard feel. When a similar sound is used later on, it becomes a more plaintive foghorn, slow lighthouse-sweep-through-mist, a great highlight to the mournfully developing dirge.
Second track title ‘A Voice Given Unto Ruin’ is a pretty good description of the vocal style displayed throughout the album. This, the longest of the five tracks at 12 and a half minutes, continues in much the same vein as the first, but there is a great still-air-in-a-stone-church drop out halfway through, before a heavy hitting re-entry. It becomes quite fast by Tyranny’s standards, but as with a lot of this kind of stuff, it’s more about slow development, slow sinking into suffocating sludgy murk, than quibbling about the exact beat per minute count.
‘Preparation of a Vessel’, like the first track, starts with a rummage through the horror movie dressing-up box, with a bit of a phantom shriek wisping around the harmonic riffs and familiar low, low howl. It’s not as cheesy as that sounds, and actually it works quite well, transporting the listener into yet another windowless chamber of gloom. The vocals are really emphasised here, with layers and layers of interweaving whispering moans reminding me of the bit in the BBC’s 1988 version of Narnia where the lion gets killed with a load of rickety special-effects ghosties floating about.
A few divebombing, whistling notes over a more static riff similarly create added interest to ‘The Stygian Enclave’, and then the final track ‘Bells of the Black Basilica’ again has the floating, ominous organ-like tones, the crushing, collapsing-cliff-face riff drops, and the croaking horror of the vocals, with a faint hint of a slightly more triumphalist tone to the chords. It’s a fitting end to a record which shows evidence of experimentation, adding new touches to a steady foundation in what made Tyranny special to begin with.
