Catafalque - We Will Always Suffer


Noise terror trio Catafalque are here to disturb you. Their oscillations are fear. Following on from 2020 album Corpses, which saw four original tracks from the troupe and an collection of remixes of the same tracks, it might be easy to suggest that they’re starting to scrape the bottom of the HARSH NOISE DRONE DOOM METAL barrel. Fortunately, with We Will Always Suffer, they’re exploring new avenues of sonic torture, and the album is all the better for it. 


Catafalque are able to cohesively weave through multiple avenues of electronic music creation. Opening track ‘Enjoy the Violence’ stacks reverberant bells against feedback-laden, metal scraping noise, whilst ‘You Are the Only One Here’ presents itself as a total inversion of what a psychedelic doom track might achieve. In place of swirling guitars that get tripped out in delay and reverb, the track has a lo-fi drum recording washed into a tower of noise and feedback, with harrowing shrieks for vocals. ‘Spectral’, a particular standout on disc 1, is more dark ambient than oppressive noise. ‘No One Will Miss You When You’re Gone’ has a clearly pitched drone as the centre piece of the track, with a huge saturated synth sound straight out of every nightmare ever dreamed in the 1980s. I like disc 1 closer ‘The Day of Wrath (Dies Irae)’, but am inclined to feel that it is surplus to requirements, as it comes across as the track with the least amount of creative work committed to disc 1, and ‘No One…’ ends in a fashion that feels more conclusive for the first half of the record.


The grand evocation of misery continues throughout disc 2. ‘Scaphism’ uses layers of interweaving, repetitious but detailed sonic events to drill deep into the brain parts that make you scared. ‘Not Even the Storm Could Wash these Hands Clean’ quite cleverly presents the sound of rain in a similar fashion to the noise textures heard previously on the record, and contrasts it with the occasional tolling of a bell and delicate piano notes. It’s like Silent Hill for your ears. ‘Sepulchre,’ which was released as a single and received praise from myself, is still one of my favourites from the whole album, for its presentation of a melancholic dream-state, walking in the clouds of the storm that preceded it. ‘She Stains the Sand Red’ is a solid track but ends rather awkwardly and abruptly. ‘…and the Children Shall Suffer’ ramps up the creepy factor with samples of playful children, but the band really close the record on a high with the industrial electronic hellscape that is ‘His Torment Will Never End.’ Shifting, pulsing filters enrich a threatening drum beat with an entrancing level of flavour and density, before almost five minutes of deafening silence get broken in a jump scare-esque manner with a repeating distorted vocal sample.


For myself, the variety found on the record is one of its strongest features. Catafalque successfully manage to experiment with their process, but still imbue it with their unique character. Fans of the genre may be surprised by this record, and they won’t be mistaking Catafalque for any other band.


Release date: June 26th, 2020


FFO: The Body, Godflesh, Sunn O)))


Band Camp: https://catafalque.bandcamp.com/album/we-will-always-suffer

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjnq0Uab1rBZr1ZcMOF3izg/featured

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CatafalqueUK/


JC

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