PROCESS OF GUILT: Slaves Beneath The Sun (DOOM): review / opinion to read on Music Waves

After five years of a too long silence, Process Of Guilt finally comes back to stun us with its post metal with sludge touches. Noticed in particular thanks to an alliance sealed with Rorcal in 2014, we had missed the Portuguese collective whose albums of a charcoal severity form crushing and vitiated golems.

The band, which includes two former members of Before The Rain, a major entity of the death doom chapel, finally resurfaces, and moreover through Alma Mater Records, a label which, as you can guess from its name, belongs to the guys of Moonspell, men of (good) taste, obviously. Process Of Guilt has all its place there.

Neither time nor age (already twenty years old) have eroded the suffocating darkness of the Portuguese whose "Slaves Beneath The Sun" reminds us of the subterranean force of a pulsating and terrifying doom from which atmosphere and light are totally driven away. At no time, the Evora's formation does not give up an inch of ground to less painful ambiences, falling endlessly in the depths of a coal mine which resounds like a metaphor of the human soul and its dark torments. Oppressive vocals that rumble with a raging penitence and massive guitars carry this absolute pain filled with an abysmal melancholy.

The result could sink by a desolate and stultifying monolithism. It is however nothing of it. Process Of Guilt knows how to make his peices dynamic, almost hypnotic in their way, convulsive and scarified (the enormous and terminal 'Host'). Waves crashing against cliffs devoured by darkness, the drums are not foreign to this seismic energy, heavy and heavy like overlapping tectonic plates ('Victims').

From this 'Demons' which spends a long time knitting mortiferous moments above a bottomless pit, the successor of "Black Earth" tightens the stranglehold until the agony, printing an asphyxiating embrace that none of the following titles will succeed in releasing. On the contrary. All along petrified, it sculpts a robust and fatal block, tense and authoritarian whose trying darkness however borders on a form of dull and harsh beauty.

With "Slaves Beneath The Sun", a sacrificial work with the allure of a way of the cross, Process Of Guilt shows that it still remains this powerful purveyor of a dolorous and crepuscular sludge. - Official website

PROCESS OF GUILT

SLAVES BENEATH THE SUN

AUTRE LABEL

DOOM