Tyranny’s Aeons in Tectonic Interment features five epic tracks of funeral doom/death with fitting song titles such as “Sunless Deluge” and “Preparation of a Vessel.” Find an abandoned tunnel and light some candles for this descent into distress. There’s nary a blast beat or uptempo thrash riff in this slow, aural decomposition of an album. Dark Descent Records strikes again!
Much is said of the vaunted label’s preference for the deepest, darkest and sometimes slowest death/doom on earth. The ritual is alive and unwell on this five track ride into the abyss. The vocals sound impossibly cavernous. The hypnotic dirges down pick or squeal into nightfall. This is quintessential funeral doom/death replete with bells, cymbal-crashes, howling backing vocals, and keyboard segments. The beat slogs to the slow transmogrification of the flesh from life to death, touched with black-blood-curdling heaviness.
The riffs aren’t as down tuned as some bands in this genre, in order to allow some dusty, ashen crypt some suffocating atmosphere for those who dwell inside. The living are entombed alive, hearts beating in synchronicity to the music slowing down beyond the capacity to pump oxygen into the extremities, which are slowly turning purple as the cymbal crashes fade into nothingness.
The riffs are too slow to ever be catchy, and Tyranny make wise use of chord transitions rooted on the sixth string to allow the down picks to sound dark. They sometimes ring notes out to vary the riffs a bit. The beats don’t flow or signify any predictable pattern on here.
Tyranny might just be the slowest band on earth, and clearly, it goes to show that its overarching singularity of style is meant as a response to doom bands who use too many acoustic segments or folk music touches. Tyranny don’t plummet into the depths at meteoric pace. They seep into the ground like redolent juice fermenting at the bottom of a heaping trash bin, slowly descending, taking with it spoilage from the surface all the way to the deepest depths of the chasm, where all life ceases to exist.
There’s not much melody to get power metal fans excited about this small sub-genre either. You won’t find solos that will land the band a cover story on rock guitar. Aeons of Tectonic Interment is minimalist to a point considerably extreme. Like poison slowly killing living cells at the point of contact, this set of decaying soundbites slowly makes its way into the corpus, entering the ear canal best at deafening volume, with the lights out and only the shivering of flesh too fevered to survive intoxication. Tyranny almost conduct a vigil on Aeons…after a death in the family, the raw pain transfixing, the grief equally crippling the bereaved of their will to live.
The music is almost unbearable played end-to-end. The tracks are long and difficult to get through in one sitting. The production leaves the instrumentation spare, keeping the music suitably atmospheric and obscure. Enjoyable primarily for the death/doom disciple, Aeons… strikes where no charcoal can feed the smoldering ember, char like no fire with only flesh to churn. Know that this isn’t plainly-stated sadness. This is music fitting for the worship of nihilism, the destruction of everything that is, for the sake of nothingness – blackness, emptiness, darkness, the trenches.
