In the wretched realms of death metal, Finland’s Lauri Laaksonen is a known commodity. After a five-year stint in Sear, LL, as he’s credited on most liner notes, founded the beastly Desolate Shrine in 2010. We here at AMG have for the most part fawned in a most undignified manner over that project’s output. On the strength of that discography alone, LL could hold his head high among his most celebrated death metal contemporaries. But his impact on the genre doesn’t end there. Since 2018, LL has released some of the very finest slabs of demoralizing deathly doom in recent memory through his band Convocation. Between debut Scars Across and follow-up Ashes Coalesce, Convocation gave us eight massive cuts of ponderous death doom that often strays into dilatory funeral doom of a stately mien. We now come to the third album of LL’s secondary project, No Dawn for the Caliginous Night, and the approach is largely the same with one noticeable augmentation. When measuring out his ingredients for this particular recipe, our boy got to “towering majesty,” mistook for gallons what should have been ounces and added several orders of magnitude more than was called for.
On Convocation’s debut, there was a definite Evoken vibe to songs like “Ruins of Ourselves” and “Allied POWs,” but Ashes Coalesce saw them moving toward a sound more their own, built on subtle mood shifts and a multi-layered vocal attack courtesy of Waste of Space Orchestra’s Marko Neuman. Neuman is in similar form on No Dawn for the Caliginous Night—more on that in a bit—but “subtle” is no longer a word that applies to the music. In fact, hold up that word to No Dawn… and it will melt into a streak of fire like a space rock burning up upon its descent into Earth’s atmosphere. By the time you reach the halfway point in opening track “Graveless yet Dead,” you’ve heard swirling organs, ominous violins, harmonized choirs, riffs that measure their gravity on the scale of celestial bodies, and Neuman’s enormous death roar. The whole thing keeps escalating like a light growing in intensity until, nearly blinding, a biblically accurate angel emerges with its six wings and concentric wheels full of eyes and multiple heads and burnished bronze appendages and it bellows in an inhuman voice, “B̴̧̈E̴͝ͅ ̸̫̈Ń̷̦Ò̸̭T̸̜̈́ ̸̟̄A̷͈͌F̵̯̊R̴̳̽Ā̷͇I̸̜͊D̶͈͛.”
No Dawn For The Caliginous Night by Convocation
No Dawn… maintains this monumental scale for its full 48-minute runtime, but smart songwriting and a symmetrical album structure keep all that grandeur from feeling one-note. With the instrumental track “Between Aether and Land” acting as a sort of intermission, the two tracks before it present at once sublime and terrifying death doom that never dips below white-knuckle intensity. While Convocation may interject passages of clean guitar lines and overt gentleness, like the one found halfway through “Atychiphobia,” but these are will-o’-the-wisps, false lights in the darkness they use to lure you into compliance before unleashing their nastiest riffs and most harrowing tectonic shifts. After the pivotal instrumental, the last two tracks are much more funereal. “Lepers and Derelicts” is the standout, if one must be chosen, with its lugubrious aura and methodically measured guitar line motif, like a bell tolling over a cemetery.
As with 2020’s Ashes Coalesce, Neuman’s impressively variegated vocal performance lifts the already stellar material on No Dawn… to a level beyond that of the band’s death doom peers. Blessed with an ideal death roar, he really knows when to let it fly, like when he expends every ounce of vein-popping energy as a counterpoint to the album’s most traditionally mournful instrumentation on closer “Procession.” Meanwhile, his judiciously applied cleans crash through the opiate haze of “Lepers and Derelicts” to carry the song to giddy heights in its final minutes. Rock solid as his performance is throughout, the most unforgettable moment is when he discharges a blood-freezing banshee wail in “Atychiphobia,” a trick he repeats to bring “Lepers and Derelicts” freefalling back to earth in its final seconds. Early in my listening, I considered the instrumental track a drawback. Now I see it as a theatrical intermission; a necessary respite from the otherwise unrelenting intensity Neuman brings to LL’s project.
I loved both of Convocation’s previous records. With No Dawn for the Caliginous Night, LL and Neuman have completed their transformation from practitioners of impressive, if well-trod death doom to a unique voice in the ranks funerophiles. This is a towering celebration of death’s enormity, packaged in the heaviest and most shimmering of vessels.
Rating: 4.5/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Everlasting Spew Records
Websites: everlastingspewrecords.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/ConvocationDoom
Releases Worldwide: November 24th, 2023
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