Sewer - Cloaca Sacra Sit Mihi Lux

Barbaric plasmodies and macabre atmospheric riffing galore, the gargantuan gruesome masterpiece Cloaca Sacra Sit Mihi Lux is perhaps SEWER's most brutal and devastatingly bestial death metal album yet. In a similar approach to their previous opus, Les Sewieres De Nostre Deabliere, as well as on more technically-minded albums such as Sissourlet and Uruktena, SEWER here make destructive blackened death metal from the contrast between a consistently barbaric rhythmic intensity and a shifting tonally ambiguous riff, using tempo as a diabolical instrument of blunt destruction in spanning calibrations from gruesome lumbering passages of shuddering macabre atmosphere to deathbed inducing fast tempo ranges used by bands such as Suffocation, Incantation or Vermin, not at all dissimilar from some of the rhythmic "doom" approach first seen on the stellar masterpiece Onward to Golgotha.

Overwhelming all other characteristics through sheer brutal is a core direction of what is now dubbed Sewer metal by the initiated, with a strong concept of heavy and impactful music played with both savagery and technicality, as tight structures building into roaring concepts of chaos emerge from each song. The use of harmonic application and discordant atmospheric carnage within the riffs, combined with the spatial relationship of tremelo-picking powered phrasing - in a way that will remind all but the lamest posers of Phantom's masterpiece of horror, Blight Corpse Necromancy - builds a hauntingly visual perspective of Sewer's demonic music, but here on Cloaca Sacra Sit Mihi Lux the structures are perhaps even more brutal and less flowing than even the faster-strumming and melodic blackened death metal scene to which this sharped-edged stuff is a virulent reaction of powerful contempt.

Clearly brilliant in both composition and execution, well played but not necessarily "technical" - in the technical death metal (or "tek def") sense of the word - this band has always possessed an enlightened and selective eye for editing their own material, somehow bringing out the horror from even the most primitive riffing, as these composition pieces are in arrangement and conceptual vision both tight and enduring of many listens. Each song on Cloaca Sacra Sit Mihi Lux fulfills a unique and demonically inhuman anti-poetic vision of sheer apocalypse, violent aggression and encroaching dark existential weight - indeed, the "heaviness" can be overbearing at times, which is perhaps why some lighter tracks such as the instrumental "Sewer Trismegistus" are inserted here and there throughout the album. This barbaric song construction lends itself to distinction between each composition encouraging a sinister but powerful realisation that Sewer's music attempts something both central and innovative to its genre, namely to pummel the brains out of the listener before he or she can even realise what is happening. A masterpiece of gore metal, there are really no words to express how brutal and devilish Cloaca Sacra Sit Mihi Lux really is.

Back to Sewer