Mesmur - S (CD)

Review
DarkUndergroundMusicZine
8/10
15.09.2017

Mesmur are an international band with members from the United States, Australia and Italy and plays funeral doom metal and this is a review of their 2017 album “S” which was released by Solitude Productions.

A very slow, heavy and dark funeral doom metal sound starts off the album along with some atmospheric synths in the background while the riffs also bring in a decent amount of melody and after awhile deep death metal growls start to make their presence known and most of the tracks are very long and epic in length.

When guitar solos and leads are utilized they are done in a very dark yet melodic fashion while all of the musical instruments have a very powerful sound to them and when screams are utilized they also add in a touch of black metal along with clean playing also being added into certain sections of the recording.

At times the music gets very experimental and progressive along with some touches touches of ambient and drone while spoken word parts are also used briefly and all of the songs stick to a very slow musical direction and you can also hear some elements of 90’s era doom/death metal at times and the closing track is an instrumental.

Mesmur plays a style of funeral doom metal that is very slow, dark and heavy while also being very experimental at times, the production sounds very professional while the lyrics cover paranoia, hopelessness, death, cosmos and apocalyptic themes.

In my opinion Mesmur are a very great sounding funeral doom metal band and if you are a fan of this musical genre, you should check out this recording. RECOMMENDED TRACKS INCLUDE “Singularity” and “Distension”.

Author: OccultBlackMetal

Review
Dark Art Conspiract
4/5
16.09.2017

A singularity is the point in a black hole where density becomes infinite, space-time bends, and the laws of physics as we know them cease to operate.

This is the perfect way to describe Mesmur’s newest album “S,” an infinitely dense soundscape that bends space and time around the listener. A meandering funeral dirge through the chaotic void that is the universe. A universe that was doomed from the start.

Mesmur is a funeral doom metal collaboration with members hailing from different parts of the globe: the U.S, Australia and Italy. Led by Yixja, the mastermind that brought to life the progressive black metal band Dalla Nebbia, along with vocalist Chris G (Orphans of Dusk), drummer Alkurion (Dalla Nebbia and Funeral Age), and bassist Michele M.

“S” is their second album, after their self-titled success, “Mesmur.” “S” will not disappoint fans of the genre. It does everything that funeral doom metal is supposed to do with a bit extra. Influences range from Evoken to Esoteric, Ea, Mar de Grises, Comatose Vigil, Ahab and Neurosis.

The music is not supposed to be “enjoyed,” but “experienced.” The synthesizer does a great job of creating a melancholic atmosphere that bends and fluxes around guttural vocals and discordant riffs that at times torture the listener with the dissonance of a dentist’s drill. At some points the distortion is very grainy. I’m not sure if that was an intentional choice or a flaw in the production. I also wasn’t a fan of the overdose of sound effects, but I suppose that was part of the experience.

Let’s talk about why the album was named “S.” The final track is called “S = k ln Ω.” This equation refers to entropy. I am not smart enough to give the exact definition justice, but put simply, entropy refers to a lack of order or predictability and the gradual decline into disorder.

I believe the song “S” along with the album encapsulates that theme. Each track is a progression into more chaos and disorder, with the first track being “Singularity” (an infinitely small but dense single point), followed by “Exile” (something going outward), “Distension” (enlarging, dilation, a ballooning effect), and finally “S” (breaking down into chaos). Indeed the first track is more tightly formed and dense than the rest, with harder distortion and more riffage. Each following track becomes more disorderly until you get to the end, which is almost an overkill of sound effects, and at times sounds like someone fell asleep on the synthesizer. But as a thematic representation of the expansion and break down of the universe, it’s fucking brilliant.

I also noticed that the cicada-like sound effects that ended the first song were played in the beginning of the last song. Were the artists trying to make an “S” shape through the album, or was that just a cool coincidence? Who knows? As one reviewer said, “If you look long into the abyss the abyss will look back. ‘S’ is the sound of the abyss looking back.” Perhaps I stared too long into the void with this one. “S” is a delicious descent into entropy. Each time you listen, there are new mysteries to discover.

So check out “S,” the sound of the universe’s demise.

Author: darkartconspiracy

Review
Doom-Metal.com
9/10
15.09.2017

You may remember Mesmur from their self-titled 2014 debut, which – after a few digressions – saw physical release through Code666 Records, perhaps unjustly more usually noted for their eclectic and experimental roster than their steadily-expanding Doom catalogue. As a side-project of Prog/Black Metal band Dalla Nebbia, it set out to explore the boundaries of extreme Death/Funeral Doom, and did so with some considerable success. Well, hopefully, you took our advice on that and picked up a copy; if not, you’re about to get the chance to discover sophomore release ‘S’, coming out through the unambiguously Doom conduit of Solitude Productions.

While it may be fair to say that a Solitude tag is a guarantee of Doom provenance rather one of automatically essential purchasing, you should definitely consider adding ‘S’ to the latter category. I couldn’t say that – on the surface, at least – Mesmur have departed radically from the formula of the debut, but, regardless, they’ve produced a worthy extension of it. Essentially, you’re getting three long (and one shorter) lush Funeral-paced Death/Doom compositions straddling a quite distinct balance between the melodic and the dissonant, and continuing the solid bedrock laid down by the album ‘Mesmur’. Indeed, if you were going to contemplate anything along the lines of “the difficult second album”, it would only be in the sense that ‘S’ is following on from a debut that basically got everything very right – it really didn’t leave a lot of headroom for obvious or easy improvement.

So, in the same vein, and definitely from the same hands (there’s only been a change of bassist, though the Dalla Nebbians are now credited by name rather than pseudonym), but not necessarily the same album. Partly down to a production which is a little louder and seems to have more of a treble bias, it sounds sharper and just that bit more angular, while the conceptual theme is more focused around the madness of the cosmos. Style-wise, it still has that quite brutal yet melodic core, with crashing guitar and deep growled vocals, that has echoes of My Shameful, while the more Prog-rock and spacier elements variously call to mind Mar de Grises and Esoteric, and – such as on ‘Exile’ – the shades of Porcupine Tree and ‘Atom Heart Mother’-era Pink Floyd hover somewhere in the background. The shortest and dreamiest track, closer ‘S = k ln Ω’ (Boltzmann’s entropy equation, if you’re interested. Thought I’d just slip that in for extra smugness, since I didn’t even have to look it up, despite not having looked at thermodynamics for a shockingly large number of years…) even carries some keyboard work that evokes thoughts of early Jean-Michel Jarre. And it’s all wrapped in some stylish artwork, by Cadaversky, that does a great job of depicting all those aspects.

These, obviously, are all good things in their own right, and credit has to go to band mastermind YixJa/Jeremy L (music, lyrics, guitar and synths) for combining them in such a way that they remain good things when unified under a broadly Death/Doom banner. And that, perhaps, is the greatest strength of Mesmur’s work so far: that it is genuinely eclectic in its approach, yet sounds completely natural in the way that meshes together. There’s very little reliance on riff or repetition, instead the various guitar and keyboard instrumental lines thread together and flow continuously onwards. And though it does have that strong Prog feel, there’s no sense of avant-garde experimentalism ‘for the sake of it’, just a smooth set of transitions and evolutions that span the entire album. Much as with ‘Mesmur’, in fact, ‘S’ presents just as strong a collection of individual tracks that are actually stronger when considered as a part of the synergistic whole of the album.

I genuinely can’t think of any reason why this shouldn’t have across-the-board appeal to extreme Doom fans of all persuasions. Nor can I find anything of any substance to criticise in either design or execution. OK, that might sound a little like sitting on the fence of “if you like this kind of thing, you’ll love this album”, but it isn’t meant that way. It’s more that Mesmur have managed to hit a proper Doom ‘sweet spot’ twice in a row, and I’m not a great believer in that sort of thing being pure coincidence. So – this is a band you probably should be both interested in and investing into, if you haven’t already discovered them and been waiting for this sophomore. Either way, it comes highly recommended as one of the contenders for a top placing on my ‘best of 2017’ list.

Author: Mike Liassides

Review
Wonderbox Metal
04.10.2017

This is Mesmur’s second album. They’re an international band and play atmospheric death/doom metal.

Featuring members of Dalla Nebbia, Mesmur play death/doom that offers the listener a little bit more than what they might usually expect to find for something with that appellation.

S combines funeral doom, death/doom, and post-metal into 53 minutes of apocalyptic despair. Think a mix of Monolithe and Esoteric, with a touch of some of Neurosis‘ more suffocating sludgy work. Crushing and monolithic, this is an album that’s as heavy as a planet and as dense as a neutron star.

The guitars offer ample distortion as well as some engaging melodies. The omnipresent synths sometimes turn to static, as if the band are intentionally channelling the cosmic background radiation into their music to further enhance the feelings of exploring deep and lonely space. By themselves both guitars and synths are highly effective at what they do. However, taken together they work so well that sometimes they seem to fuse into one atmospheric whole, drawing the listener in as they’re brutalised by deep deathgrowls.

This is music to gaze at the night sky to. While the oppressive nature of the limitless void crushes in on you, you feel hopeless and insignificant, especially as the cosmic grandeur of S unfolds around you with colossal grandeur and hideous beauty. Mesmur have crafted this music well, and it’s as devastatingly expansive as it is inhumanly unforgiving.

I like a good bit of death/doom, especially when it’s stretched out to epic lengths, has an apocalyptic funeral streak, and is heavily atmospheric. Mesmur don’t just hit the spot, they crush it utterly.

Author: wonderboxmetal

Review
The Grim Tower
7/10
26.09.2017

The sophomore from international atmospheric death/doomers Mesmur is a much slower-paced, albeit spatial affair that truly seems to take you into the cosmos. In the nature of death/doom, the record features around ten thousand pounds of increasingly slow doom riffs, fronted by waves of potent and sometimes otherworldly melodies. It very much is a melodic doom release, which also benefits greatly from the level of electronics apparent in the last one, though to a much different level.

I will be honest though, as I found this one a bit difficult to get into from the start. It comes in at almost a grueling pace, but is decorated just well enough to give me a sort of euphoric feeling, which is sometimes accentuated in the vocal filters. There’s no clean singing here, but said filters can give the vocals a sort of inhuman presence, making the whole thing feel truly (excuse the pun) out of this world. There are four rather large pieces here, each one seeming to be much in the same vein as the last, with the album’s outro appealing the most to me as it seems to encapsulate one of the most brilliant representations of the surrounding stars, planets and galaxies that I’ve ever heard. Keep in mind, I’ve listened to NASA’s Voyager recordings (and may still have them on my hard-drive somewhere) which show space as a little bit melodic in itself. It almost feels as if we’re all the result of some remarkable tune of cosmic orgasm, by which this performance truly showcases.

Mesmur haven’t made a bad album yet, and though I couldn’t grasp onto it in the way that I could with the previous; I still would recommend the record for the sake of it’s own creativity and decision to go beyond the common applications found in death/doom, even in the atmospheric realms of it. Mesmur show that they’re not just good at making a death/doom recording, but that they can also illustrate the very stars themselves if given enough time. With a brillaint production value and enough unimistakable melodies flowing through this thing, I’d definitely consider it a solid release. If you’re looking for death/doom that mourns the world above, instead of the one we’re in right now, then I would have to recommend you check out Mesmur’s S. To be honest though, I’m trying to figure out what the “S” stands for. My first guesses were “Space” and “Superman” though I didn’t see the latter described within the disc’s linear notes. S seems just as bleak as I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream and therein lies the appeal.

Author: Eric May