Doom/death is a fickle thing. The interesting thing about the template laid out a quarter-century ago is that it was always a ramshackle synthesis. For all the gothic grandeur that the Peaceville 3 aspired to, all those landmark early albums – Gothic, As the Flower Withers, Serenades, and so on – were always riding a half-step short of collapse. Few other subgenres, moreover, can boast such a fertile early period with such a relatively small outward impact. So, given that playing painstakingly classic doom/death metal in 2015 is perhaps the least fashionable career move possible, the small pockets of acolytes that rise to the surface often hit a higher mark of quality.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Indesinence has a deep grasp of its sound’s history, and wields that lineage on its latest album III with confidence and wry playfulness. The band’s instrumental tones are natural, clean, even mellow – they don’t need mountains of amps or tricky pedals to bring the heavy, since it’s there already in the marrow of the songs. In fact, in no aspect is III aiming for extremity: it’s neither the slowest nor the heaviest nor the angriest nor the most… anything, really.
But that, it turns out, is to its benefit: Indesinence doesn’t feel like it’s grasping for grand gestures here, which makes the album’s grandness much more natural. “Nostalgia,” for example, opens with a hugely doomed downbeat, but soon adds a calm, exploratory, almost lazy guitar lead. The song shifts between a measured plod and thicker, double-bass backed chugging, so that when, about five minutes in, it tips into a full death metal tilt, it feels both surprising and fully earned.
Make no mistake – despite the careful nuance of the album, this is still slow, angry-sad music for feeling miserable, but the band writes songs like a painter with a disdain for repeating palettes. The style is steady but the colors and shading are kaleidoscopic. While the bedrock is just as you’d expect – Cathedral, Paradise Lost, Winter – there are similarities to Novembers Doom and Morgion in Ilia Rodriguez’s gut-deep exhortations, and album highlight “Strange Meridian” even has echoes of San Francisco’s dearly missed The Gault. Elsewhere, the capacious riffwork of “Mountains of Mind” somehow manages to hint at what Immortal‘s Sons of Northern Darkness might sound like as a doom/death album, and when Indesinence transitions seamlessly into a cover of The Third Bardo‘s 1967 single “Five Years Ahead of My Time” that plays like straight-up Type O Negative worship, the listener is left thinking, How the hell did they do that?, and, Damn, that was fun.
Throughout III, Indesinence displays a total command of riff and rhythmic variation, which ensures that these long (loooooong) songs never get bland, even as they sometimes play with the same basic, chunky chords for several minutes. “Strange Meridian” rides a triumphant, ascending chord progression for most of its time, but continually raises the intensity by adding some almost Thergothon-like organ tones and the most pained, impassioned vocals of the entire album. Despite the fact that each of III‘s songs is a self-contained universe, and that the combined pedigree of the band means that this sometimes static style of doom/death is enlivened by a satisfying array of embellishments, the best thing about the album might also be the hardest to articulate. For a very, very long album, III actually feels much shorter. And although doom/death is, almost by definition, suffocatingly dense, Indesinence moves consistently with a light touch.
For all the aggression, sadness, and desperation of the album, III is remarkably calming. It feels more suitable for a walk in the woods on a warm day than for skulking around some crumbling graveyard on a blustery November night. That just might be the biggest difference between Indesinence’s doom/death and the formative albums that form its origin story: nothing here feels exaggeratedly, self-consciously miserable, but rather like an honest, plain-spoken account of life and living. The weightiest truths are often the simplest – things change, people leave, and time grinds its weary orbit. It’s good to feel those hurts.
