Year of release: 2019
Label: Metalkalve
Rating: 7 / 10
Today I present to you the second (the first will be reviewed later, too) release of the Latvian label / distro Metalkalve, which is owned by the venerable Gints Albužis, well-known to some Bagnik Zine readers. EREMOS is a solo project of the musician named Dāvis Kovaļš, which reflects his gloomy thoughts about being, the fate of humanity and, of course, death. They are served to the accompaniment of a ferocious funeral death doom metal, borrowing certain atmospheric and structural solutions from modern Black Metal.
EREMOS music is built on a basic set of instruments and corresponding work with sound. The recording location of the album is indicated as the coordinates inside the digipack (Riga, Locomoties st. 56); I won’t be surprised if the residential building where the musician lives is located at this address. If you listen carefully, in the EREMOS sound you can see a lot of echoes of amateur indoor projects that were popular among their own authors 10 years ago. However, where depressive bedroom creators stuck a guitar into a laptop and buzzed in vain, Dāvis worked with his straight hands, so the sound of the album turned out wonderful. The drums seem to be programmed, but, again, they are made out so cool that I can't say for certain.
The album is gaining momentum gradually. If at first there is a fairly basic doom metal with an icy character, then higher speeds, dissonances, synths, samples, parts of a solo guitar and even almost groove riffs appear. Interestingly, most of them fall on the shortest song - “Echoes of Malice”. All material combines a sense of alienation and emptiness. There is not even the slighthest melody that gives a faint hope that not everything is lost. Vanity and hopelessness, like in MGŁA works. Only EREMOS music makes us believe in the words behind it, in contrast to the melodious excercises (in futility) of the Poles. The most colorful, in my opinion, is the song “Lascera, Sovereign of Slaughter”. In terms of riffs, it’s not the most interesting thing, but the frenzied synth parts evoke a hell of a horror, and the text and music are combined just as perfectly as a pig and a truffle. I can’t name a band similar to EREMOS in sound. Sometimes fragments slip through that someone already had somewhere, but I can’t remember who.
The lyric part is made quite interesting. Besides the fact that it defines music, it uses the most primitive sizes, not far away from the minimalist poetry of early OBITUARY. Everything is written in quatrains of one to three words, which looks bad on paper. However, rhyme is observed everywhere, and the selection of expressions is ususally good enough to convey the grotesque images that arise in the head of the author. There is, however, some percent of outright hack, too.
The CD edition of the album was released in the format of a 6-panel digipack with a simple design and all the lyrics inside. In general, nothing more is needed here. Details on a video. I recommend “The Glass Mind of a Recluse” to fans of ruthless metal, which does not try to entertain the listener with whistles and fakes, but gives itself as is.
English (UK) 
Крыўская