(In January of this year Personal Records released a powerhouse new album by the Spanish death/doom band Onirophagus. Our Comrade Aleks gives it a very good quick review below, along with his very enjoyable interview with the band’s vocalist, Paingrinder.)

Catalan death-doom band Onirophagus have been through a lineup rotation since the release of their second album Endarkenment (Illumination through Putrefaction) in 2019, and with two new guitarists and a bassist in the lineup, they have recorded 45 minutes of material under the title Revelations from the Void.

Initially, Onirophagus focused on the legacy of the grimmest death-doom bands of the past, those that avoided melodrama and “gothic sentiments”. And how could it be otherwise, if almost all the members either previously performed or still perform in thrash and death bands? Perhaps that is why the new album is so heterogeneous, although sustained in a single style.

In some places, Onirophagus pulls the veins with classic depressive doom, a model of dissonance; in others they deafen with a death metal attack in the name of Incantation; and in others they invite us into the paranoid nightmare of Esoteric. The mixture of these influences serves the purpose of creating the individuality of the band. Even the violin, appearing in “Black Brew”, plays its part in an unexpected schizophrenic style.

I guess, you can hear the rebellion of the bands from the noughties in Onirophagus, those who found the key to depicting madness with the help of new combinations of familiar formulas. These crushing and murderously dark compositions can be majestic and even melodic, and in this contrast lies their aesthetic value. The band almost never returns to the theme played within the track, preferring to move on from plot to plot. After all, Revelations from the Void is a conceptual album and the musical accompaniment of this story is appropriate. Onirophagus did everything right. Continue reading »