Mournful Congregation
The Monad Of Creation

I wouldn't know how to begin or what words to use for an album of this magnitude. I wouldn't know also because little to nothing is known about the band, given their intention to remain in complete anonymity. However, man has a great gift, which is perception. Listening to the very first notes of this album, even the most inattentive listener perceives the power of the most extreme and exhausting doom, generated by man himself. A grueling funeral doom, that truly destroys any strength of spirit to leave you alone, not even in the company of yourself anymore. Your body gradually tears and breaks under the blows of an album devastating from every point of view.

The Pythagorean monad was that from which everything was born, an absolute philosophical principle that implied creation. Mournful Congregation destroys the concept of monad, altering it to the creation of human pain. The basic concept remains the same, but its purpose changes. Creation takes on a negative connotation, somewhat like what Schopenhauer argued: at the moment a person is born, those who gave them life become guilty. They have generated through their two miseries, a third misery that will have to face the pain and difficulty of the world. All this is what (more or less) the Australian Mournful Congregation tried to insert in this album, composed of "only" four tracks.

"Mother - water, the great sea wept" is one of the most lacerating and harrowing compositions my ears have ever heard. It is the desperate cry of man in the suffering impulsive search to placate his wrath, a malevolent feeling according to the ancients. And it is precisely wrath that is the main theme of the song, which also takes some verses from Homer's Iliad. Eighteen minutes of infinite affliction, dark pyramids, violence dragged on infinitely and in the midst of all this, the momentary, unhopeful peace.

"As I drown in loveless rain" in the same way as the previous one leaves no escape. It almost seems that the group wants to reaffirm the inseparable dualism between music and suffering that they strongly emphasize in the opener. The riffs become sound poems that cut the soul, darken, discourage and finally destroy our certainties. Difficult to face a song like this. Existential darkness set to music.

"When the weeping dawn beheld its mortal thirst" opens scenarios of awareness that we would not have expected. It opens paths in the listener's soul with an elusive delicacy, typical of a delirious world, now at the brink. A lullaby that while sounding sweetly recalls melancholy and darkness. Scratches that forcefully graze the flesh...

Finally "The monad of creation". A reflection on human life and what it entails. The definitive farewell to any certainty, the very illusion of life as a continuation beyond death. The tomb on existence, with glimpses of delicate peace, an end in itself, lost in a mare magnum of pain and black suffering. The symbol of life and death that unite in the sublime call of nature...

An endless road, a forest too impenetrable to be crossed, a dark tunnel of claustrophobic grandeur. Everything is black, hopes are now finished. The journey has come to an end. The monad of creation is felt as a record that at times becomes truly difficult for the state of emotional trance in which it throws you violently, without remorse.

Not just music. Feelings.

1. "Mother - Water, The Great Sea Wept" (18:21)
2. "As I Drown In Loveless Rain" (11:22)
3. "When The Weeping Dawn Beheld Its Mortal Thirst" (10:03)    
4. "The Monad Of Creation" (20:53)