Individualism, Narcissism, Hedonism – August 16, 2017.
Debut album, 100-limited tape edition through New Jersey based Prison Tatt Records.
www.prisontatt.com
Album premiere and first english review by No Clean Singing
here, August 15.
"As I listened to this debut album by the French band Malemort
I asked myself a question I’ve asked before — though to be clear, I
haven’t heard many records in the league of this one: Why do our minds
and emotions make such deep connections with music that’s so
convincingly calamitous, so mercilessly stripped of hope, so sodden with
misery and soaked in blood, so cataclysmically heavy, so frighteningly
violent?
(...)
I don’t know. I’m no psychologist. I only know what I feel, and for
fuck’s sake I’ll just say it up front — this album is the most
stunningly powerful, staggeringly horrific, blindingly apocalyptic doom
album I’ve heard this year, and it has few peers in any year.
Whether the first time through, or the second time, this is a rare experience. I didn’t realize how rare even when we premiered
the album’s closing track in June. I described it then as a
twelve-and-a-half-minute doom monolith that earns the title it bears
(“State of Collapse”), a vast and stunningly heavy crusher that brings
to mind visions of humankind’s most vaunted creations disintegrating
into mountainous piles of smoking rubble, a song that heaves and lurches
with the weight of catastrophe on its back, leaving a trail of decay
and despondency in its wake, and then moves forward like a titanic
juggernaut, its destructiveness intensifying, the lead guitar vibrating
like a ferocious and fearsome poltergeist, and the mammoth drum strikes
and bass notes becoming more animated and even more purposefully
bone-breaking.
But I hadn’t heard the other three tracks back then, and now I have.
I didn’t fully realize how splintering the experience of the whole album is, and now I do.
Holy shit."
