Review Summary: Atmospheric black metal minus the atmosphere and any sense of direction.
It’s rare that I feel uncertain about an album after multiple listens. Ash Borer’s
The Irrepassable Gate from this year comes to mind, and even though I’ve slapped the obligatory rating on it, I’m still not sure what warranted that 3.5 exactly. What’s most disconcerting about this sort of album is that you’re never very confident in your feelings on it. Sure, maybe you’re pretty sure you generally like or dislike it (though I wouldn’t say that degree of uncertainty is impossible), but it feels like you’re either overrating it, underrating it, or some mixture of both no matter what you do. However, in the case of the Cambridge trio behind Terra and their latest opus
Mors Secunda, I’ve decided that they were just as uncertain making the damn thing as I am now listening to it.
As it turns out, the reason
Mors Secunda made me feel so disconcerted is because it’s as aimless as humanly possible. Granted, Terra have proclaimed themselves as a bastardized hybrid of drone and atmospheric black metal; Weakling, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Ash Borer rolled up into one fundamental ball. But all three of those bands had pretty clear goals, at least in their best works.
Mors Secunda fails exceptionally in that regard. It checks off components like clockwork. Hypnotic tremolos for guitar riffs, check. Tediously rhythmic drum work, check. Harsh shrieks mixed absurdly below everything else, check. Incessant attempts at creating atmosphere, check. Actually, I take the last one back. It’s obvious there’s supposed to be a vibrant atmosphere to the record, but Terra either forgot to tack it on at the end or don’t know how to do it in the first place. So what’s left is an atmospheric black metal album without the atmosphere which is absolutely as flavorless as it sounds.
Mors Secunda’s forty-minute runtime is split right down the middle between two beefy tracks, “Apotheosis” and “Nadir”. Neither leave much impression across their bloated lengths, and each more or less do the same things during their respective spans. The repetitive waves of trems and blast beats give up their secrets basically the second they appear and, minus the odd stripped down buildup (of which there are two, one for each track conveniently), that’s all that really happens. The guitars and bass sounds good from a production standpoint, but the drums are produced too loudly and powerfully to gel properly. Conversely, the vocals are so vaguely present and lowly mixed that they’re a nonfactor in truth. Hell, even looking at the album by its production it seems uncertain.
Now all this sounds rather negative, but
Mors Secunda doesn’t strain the ears in any truly bad way, it’s just boring and haphazardly constructed. If you have forty minutes to waste, then it won’t really bother you, but it won’t intrigue you either. It’s like a group of guys gathered to try their hand at making atmospheric black metal, but ended up missing the mark by a yard. Which would be understandable, even forgivable, if it were a debut, but
Mors Secunda is a sophomore effort. So I struggle to conclude anything other than that the guys behind Terra just didn’t really know what they were doing. A for effort guys. Like a C- or something for content, I don’t really care.
