Premiere: Et Moriemur – “Communio”
It’s like a Wonder Ball, but without the chocolate that tastes like pure sulfur.
Did you experience the debilitating disappointment that a Wonder Ball offered as a kid too? Chocolate and SweeTarts at the same time!? Kids were at least at the second stage of Ed McMahon meme just thinking about it. The candy was fine, I guess, but the dust that coated the inside of the hollow chocolate shell caused a rare-chemical reaction that resulted in ancient stegosaurus shit.
But now’s not the time for my weekly complaint letter to Nestle. Instead, the Toilet is happy to premiere this left-of-normal atmo-death/doom track by Czech band Et Moriemur. “Communio” is a slow-building and consistently daunting track that starts nothing like it finishes. Kicking off with a few sections of almost-industrial sounding rock with a funky beat, it quickly shifts into their ancient themes with an unexpected little piano part over doomy riffs and Gregorian chanting in a room acoustically built for such purposes. All pieces sound like something I would want crammed together, but it’s a bit of a mystery how they actually pull it off. Even one of the largest candy makers in the world couldn’t pull off such a great sounding combo.
Epigrammata, ultimately, is an album about death and that comes through crystal clear in this track. Though it’s not at all funeral doom; there are major key melodies too to remind us about the hidden side of mourning. The reason it exists at all. If you’re a language nerd, there’s plenty of ancient Greek and Latin here to send you back to your old textbooks. It’s an epic-as-a-genre type thing, which they easily pull off despite their unusual amount of experimentation. Click play and smash the nearest piece of chocolate on your desk.
I can’t claim familiarity with all of these bands, but I agree with most of their “for fans of” list of Towards Atlantis Lights, Rotting Christ, Batushka, Illimitable Dolor, (early) Opera IX, Thergothon, Skepticism, Disembowelment, Spectral Voice, and Bell Witch, if that does anything for ya. There’s not really any black metal in this track, but check out “Sanctus” along with three other tracks on their Bandcamp page for some tremolo.
Brought to you by the always-great Transcending Obscurity Records, be sure to pre-order this one over at their Bandcamp page before the release on March 20.
