It might be tempting to some to give a cursory listen to Sendai, Japan's Begräbnis and dismiss them for their simplicity and unfiltered influences siphoned from '90s funeral doom, but such an assessment of these stoic servants of the crypt would be a grave error. One of the few irrefutable facts about humanity is its unmitigated mortality. The decay of the body into fleshy debris is something that every human being will experience if they have the misfortune to live long enough, and while the subject of death is a preoccupation for many metal bands, few can produce such an unvarnished glimpse of the matter as Begräbnis (whose name literally means "Funeral" in German).
Their debut LP Izanaena feels like a divine tragedy and traversal through the paces of one's own requiem and internment. A final pilgrimage guided by a shrowded wraith, whose grip around your wrist graphs to your skin like a chilled fetter, penetratingly cold and sodden, as if it had been resting on the bed of a subterranean stream for weeks.
Far from a detriment, Begräbnis's dominant characteristic is their arrestingly narrow sound. Icy guitars, struck at a mournful pace, allowing the notes to decay without interruption, each sonorous soul gasping in despair and then dissolving in the air— making room for the next to be ushered out and forced to submit to a similar fate. There is no real percussion to speak of, not even a marshal beat to evoke our march to the grave. The beats you hear are sparse but thunderous, produced by a drum machine, whose regard for its human compatriots is fittingly indifferent.
The somber undertow of Izanaena is undeniable, but what makes it truly and inescapably saturnine is its internationalism. With members from all over the world, moored in Japan, producing dirges under a German name and adorn with the spiral reel of stony, Celtic knots, they are a band whose message is reflected in every beating human heart that to pulses gayly above hungry ground. Pulsing little flowers, destined to someday wither into stillness. Begräbnis's Izanaena is an album of subtle ambition, whose grim conceit is that it has the inclination, and what's further, the capability, to blanket the Earth with dread in the face of our inexorable extinguishment.
Get a copy of Izanaena from Weird Truth Productions.
