And just when you think that the term ‘miserable’ could not get any more miserable than a world where every scrap of fun or instinctive spontaneity has been eliminated overnight and where recycling bins the world over are fuller than a tick on a tampon, this gigantic slab of misery drifts through the fog that is 2020.
‘The Great Hatred’ is, quite simply, a phenomenally beautiful doom recording that is, as you would demand, layered simplistically but crushingly powerfully and contains enough ‘crunch’ to let those genre-warriors stick the ‘death/doom’ sticker right in the middle of its cold, ghostly forehead. Using that good old formula of lengthy, trudging tracks that beat you with a claw hammer, highlights include the sumptuous desperation of ‘Drowning’, the calamitous tumble that is ‘Locura’ and receiving the triumphant accolade for being literally toe-splittingly depressive – the title track ‘The Great Hatred’.
It’s not actually that often that a doom record of such funereal proportions grabs me in the way that this one manages to. The last one I can recall was by Arrant Saudade and this record is very much in the same vein. Thoroughly absorbing, well worth listening to and then we will all jump together, right?
9/10
https://aphonicthrenodydoom.bandcamp.com/album/the-great-hatred-atmospheric-death-doom-metal