Wreck of the Hesperus: Light Rotting Out

Anyone who doesn’t enjoy this album and pretends to understand depressing funeral doom is full of crap.  So full of crap.  We’re talking like your DNA is literally crap if you say such a thing.  Your parents were no better than the C.H.U.D. that spews the bile-ridden sewage that led to there actually being a sequel called C.H.U.D. II.  Never thought you’d see a reference like that in a review like this, did you?  Think again.  Point is, if you review this with a “not for everyone” phrase somewhere inserted into your babble, don’t even publish it.  Normally when something is this old we have to avoid it anymore, because we keep getting inundated by new things, most of which we don’t like anyway, but newer reviews get more hits in the essence of business, even though we don’t make any money.  Regardless of our lack of actual status of this being a “job,” we do like people to know we exist, so recently we’ve been focusing more on the new so the hits keep coming.  This is different.   This is from Ireland.  And this is from awesome.   Aesthetic Death has always been a fine label (they did the CD version of this, check out Svart Records if you’re into vinyl and want to buy it).  For some reason this one came recently, like in the last few months, but in spite of the fact that it’s three years older than what we’ve been looking at, it absolutely needs reviewed.  Wreck of the Hesperus is an awesome band name from a banal poem.  Light Rotting Out is an awesome album from a most non-banal band.

  

One of the things we like is presence, and this has presence before you even listen to it.  Though, please note, the artwork you see at the start of this review isn’t the actual art of the packaging, it just serves to represent it all together.  Light Rotting Out (the CD version) comes packaged in a large, almost DVD-sized slip case with separate cards of almost the same size with lyrics, information about the band, and artwork.  That alone makes you want to listen to it, because it’s pretty clear it’s going to be something dark and foreboding looking at the layout.  But foreboding around here often gives way to foreboring and we wish we didn’t fall for the lies.  These guys, however, don’t lie to you.  They’re pretty honest about what they are and you have absolutely 100% of a clue going in what to expect.  Right on their Facebook page (link below) you find they formed in 2004 “with a unified goal to create utterly extreme, horribly heavy, sewage laden – manky as be fucked filthy anti-music that sounds like its rotting apart.”  And that about sums it all up for us so we don’t have to do any work.  Why continue?  Oh yes, we need another paragraph.

 

Light Rotting Out hits all the right notes of depressing, angst, hatred, disgust, and decay.  The recording quality creates a horridly destroyed atmosphere that makes home recording sound like a good idea for once.  The chords are just perceivable enough among the sludge in which they dwell, just enough that you can feel the riffs, but not enough that anyone except the most versed in hatred will be able to grasp it.  The drums fall apart, the screams echo out of an abandoned mine shaft, it’s just one huge pile of decay.  And it’s the kind of the decay that is at once visible, but yet to truly understand requires the huge distance of forty minutes in only three tracks.  The final one, “The Holy Rheum,” is a whopping 20+ minutes of funeral dirge with some devastatingly killer riffs, a huge, silent moment of remembrance near the end, and then a pounding set of chords that put the final defibrillator shocks to your heart to make sure you’re actually dead.  Every once in awhile we’re surprised around here, or at least pleased, and this would be one of those moments.  We’ll likely have to put this in our top whatever of 2014, regardless of its year of release.  Apologies for the Youtube video above, it’s all we can find.  For some reason these guys have yet to grasp the power of Bandcamp.

 

Wreck of the Hesperus Official Facebook

Written by Stanley Stepanic

Wreck of the Hesperus: Light Rotting Out
Aesthetic Death / Streaks Records
5 / 5