A day full of cheesy celebrations of love like Valentine’s Day was the ideal framework for the fake mourning of the two charming ladies in black in the cover art of Feretri, out on February 14th 2013. Since their start back in 1995 Abysmal Grief have been a, let’s say, tormented band with frequent changes in the line-up sometimes accounted for as to “mysterious reasons” in the duly gloomy official biography. However the band was able to keep their distinctive sound and style faithfully, a style devoted to a gothic-flavoured, grotesque evocation of occult and morbid atmospheres, necromantic rituals, funereal cults, via a winning, unique blend of vintage-sounding Hammond organ-driven heavy, horror prog and way sinister heavy doom (-gothic?) metal. It is not easy to pinpoint Abysmal Grief’s style, and if a gothic component occurs, be sure we are not dealing with any honey-dripping surrogate of horror, as Abysmal Grief are creepy, nasty, misanthropic, evocative and insanely attractive like an old horror movie. In their albums this band is able to evoke the eerie, dark and blasphemous ambiance they masterfully set up during their awesome, occult-looking horror-drenched live exhibitions. I had the luck of seeing three shows by Abysmal Grief in the last three years, so believe me …
Album Feretri is Abysmal Grief’s third full-length album and comes after almost four years from the latest, monster album Misfortune and a further change in the line-up. However during these years the band has been able to keep the wide and faithful fan base quiet by feeding them with two slabs of blasphemic tunes during 2011 and late 2012, i.e. the substantial Foetor Funereus Mortuorum vinyl-only EP and the Celebrate What They Fear 7" EP, respectively. But Abysmal Grief’s fans are as ravenous as the vampires on the band’s logo or the non-dead, or semi-dead that fit the band’s fave old cemeteries so well. A full album was needed. And there it is! Feretri includes 6 tracks for a 45 minute-long creepy trip, a “Night on the Bald Mountain”-like experience drenched with occult and mystical atmospheres and devoted to worshiping an ancestral and infernal cult of Death via the band’s unique macabre, necromantic doom. Tracks seem to be organized according to a sort of narrative scheme where long, creepy funereal litanies alternate with frenzied, sacrilegious Sabbah dances and pictorial, highly atmospheric, nocturnal intervals. These scenes or moods may vary across tracks as well as within single tracks, as the band employed frequent tempo changes. Each track is an adventure and all the tracks are like an infernal saga.
Funereal bells and ghostly whispers will immediately drag you into action, in the graveyard, at the onset of the opening track, “Lords of the Funeral”. However the real call of the grim keepers of this Gate to Hell is the combined burst of raw, downtuned guitars and vibrating bass, the echoing baroque sounds of the keyboards, the ritual booming drums and the solemn, evil, roaring, grim theatrical vocals by keyboard player Labes C. Necrothytus. “Hidden in the Graveyard” is a night-time adventure in the graveyard lead by an overpowering, crushingly heavy, uptempo, horror doom rhythm that will make you headbang in time with the nasty creatures of the netherworld exhaling from the crevasses of tombstones and crypts. The beating rhythm in the dark suite “Sinister Gleams” possesses the hypnotic power of macabre folk ballads and ancestral propitiate dances. The short, instrumental track "Crepusculum” is an amazing atmospheric interlude where the sounds of an otherwise normal summer night in the countryside (crickets, nocturnal birds) are turned to sinister expectation, if not sheer horror, via some simple and somber notes on those amazing keyboards. What will follow, “The Gaze of the Owl”, is a breathtaking burst of pure creepy doom where Abysmal Grief mix with Electric Wizard and Cathedral or Reverend Bizarre, and where scary invocations by sick, layered ghoul-like vocals alternate with the howls of the guitars. The nightmarish adventure in the baroque graveyard is closed by the painfully slow and deadly malignant melody of the final doom suite “Her Scythe”, where sabbathian riffs and keyboard sounds are progressively drenched by melancholy before dying out into silence.
Abysmal Grief’s Feretri is out as CD via the Italian label Terror From Hell Records since February 14th 2013. Those of you who need the complementary ghostly background creaking from the vinyl platter added to the blasphemous rituals will have to wait for the LP version, that will be out via Horror Records, the Danish label that released some of the previous works by this Italian band. Album Feretri in particular, and Abysmal Grief in general, are a must for those who are attracted by vintage horror movies, and by creepy doom in the vein of Electric Wizard, early Black Sabbath, Reverend Bizarre, etc., past and present Italian occult prog and horror metal, like Goblin, Malombra, Jacula, Paul Chain, Death SS, Cultus Sanguine, and the suffocating, occult, blasphemous and morbid ambiance as in Mortuary Drape.
Feretri sounds great for sounds and production. I am not able to say if this is the best album sofar by Abysmal Grief. I am addicted to their music like dope and this is the dose I was craving for.
If you too are in the army of the Abysmal Grief dope addicts, it’s time for quenching your thirst …
Words: Marilena Moroni
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