Dead Elephant
Thanatology

I open the umbrella in anticipation of a rain of ashes.

This is what I think when I hear the infernal cries of the creatures emerging from the dark limbs of Italy, a mother who has learned to be culturally deaf due to the death lingering in the neurotic capacities of her (in)habitants. Crying becoming screams and symptoms of imminent end, loss and inconclusion. It's easier to lose the way than to find it, but even traveling in a swamp is not so bad. This is the sound of Dead Elephant, the swamp lucidly blackened by the caustic study of these deaths. Thanatology in devastating echoes, annihilation of being, and so the funeral begins: "Bardo Thodol" is the opening reading, while the coffin parades among the listeners, to the marching rhythm of guitar and narrating/wailing voice, the rhythm section forcefully enters, a lunatic bass carving its way through the drum hits, until it opens up to monstrous screams, 14 minutes of hell, amidst magnetic sounds and tons of distortions. "On The Stem" starts with a funeral melody lost in time, introducing sidereal melodies, voices in a breath of death, even in choral openings towards Sleepian/Zuian shores. The hard and frenzied nerve of the album is "Destrudo" which, besides drastically lowering the work's timing, also accelerates it, grinding together attitude and speed/anger hc to sludge demolition, until the abandonment of the last 16 minutes of this terrifying creature. 

"...when I wander alone in the Bardo[...]allow the darkness of ignorance to be dispelled..."

It's wise to open your ears.