Dwellnought – Monolith Of Ephemerality Review

Monolith Of Ephemerality is the ambitious debut of Italian quartet Dwellnought, which formed in 2023 and released one prior demo last year. The band proclaims it blends black metal and doom, but you’ll find moments of death metal within as well as a heavy dose of noise, which at times makes the doom ebb ever closer to sludge territory. As such, it will be more than fair for some listeners to feel this album is a bit disjointed. If, however, you look at Monolith Of Ephemerality as an exercise in dissolution that pits songs, and really the full journey of the album, against their end like age breaking the body, you may encounter a more unified experience.

As is common, the album opens with a brief intro track of ominous tones and bits of noise to set the stage before ceding to the 17-minute behemoth that is “The Final Desire Is Unbeing.” Starting the album in earnest with a song that accounts for about a third of its runtime is a bold choice and not the last Dwellnought will make. After a fade-in of drums, the song bursts forth with a squall of sound. The production for much of the album is raw and claustrophobic, made even moreso by the songwriting. At first, one guitar creates an oppressive sound, like a black cloud raining down on the rest of the musicians, while the other attempts to slash through it with tremolo riffs, like a machete in a dense jungle. The density of the songwriting and sound often leaves the drums feeling more like a thud than a thunder during these more domineering stretches. After a couple of minutes, the song does break open to let you catch your breath, but it doesn’t truly feel like a relief as the track pivots to cleaner notes and rhythms that start to feel almost hypnotic, as if they’re attempting to give you the Hansel and Gretel treatment and lull you into the oven. The pulse is broken, and the song spins into an ascending black-metal tornado of fiery riffs and animalistic drums, where the constant thud of the kick drums sounds like a rolling flat tire on a highway about to burst.

The song continues this sort of ebb and flow of ugliness, but does eventually crash back to Earth with a rockslide collapse of a guitar note. In fact, one stretch is reminiscent of Meshuggah’s “Mind’s Mirror,” which opens the door to our first real stretch of tearing a song down into the depths. Even when the tremolos do return, they feel like they’re attacking the song like that one final foot to the face as it’s gripping the cliff’s edge with little strength left. “The Final Desire Is Unbeing” is atonal, pulsing, ugly, slow, assaultive, oppressive and more before its slowly pummeled notes drag the listener to the finish line only to be greeted by a nearly Gorgutsian dissonant frying pan to the skull to start “Crystalized Flesh Identities Condensed into Wombs.” If the prior song was kicking you down a cliff, this one is seeing you fall into the abyss at the bottom of that cavern and slowly suffocated. Cristian Torrigiani’s drumming is pretty much the only buoy available to grab onto through these nearly 10 minutes. The entirety of track three is a miasma of uncomfortable noise and sustained guitar ugliness, even on the rare occasions a repeated riff does appear. Dwellnought makes the rather curious decision to subdue the song and end it with more than three minutes of a spoken-word sample backed by eerie sound effects. Perhaps the less assaultive nature was meant to give the listener a needed break, but it feels overly long and saps a bit of the momentum.

Monolith of Ephemerality by DWELLNOUGHT

Maybe that breather is intentionally too long, so that when the Obscene Majesty style opening to ironically titled “III Whispers” kicks in, it’ll give you a jump scare. This penultimate track is the final path to true dissolution. Dwellnought shoves its hands into the garbage disposal of brutal death metal, but with a hideous production that makes it difficult to comprehend, similar to the aforementioned Devourment album. During this stretch, they even fire off a squirrely, whirly little guitar “lead” to make it more chaotic. The proclamation of end times, however, comes with a raucous drum fill and sustained gurgle, ushering in the collapse of the song and the album as a whole. The final eight minutes of “III Whispers” feel like four musicians trying to beat their own song to death like it’s the printer from Office Space.  Sure, there’s still some pulsing doom and fits of blasting black metal, but ultimately, this song acts like the final scene on the train tracks in Drag Me To Hell, pulling the listener kicking and screaming into a horrible end. As that song ends, “Beyond the Mind” closes the album with nearly six minutes of atrocious noise, letting you know there is nothing left for you to hold onto.

As is typically the case with debuts, Dwellnought doesn’t seem to be quite fully baked yet, and that’s perfectly fine. There are some odd choices here and there on Monolith Of Ephemerality. The varied influences don’t always complement each other or smoothly blend into something new, but what they’ve put together remains an interesting experiment in aural assault. Chances are high that these Italians are only getting started, and the future is bright, so long as your version of brightness is ugly, hellish soundscapes.