Skepticism
Farmakon

When Dante, the Poet of Italian literature, decided to venture into that "dark forest" that all of us have imagined at least once in our lives, he did so with the specific (though perhaps undeclared) intent of ultimately ascending to Paradise at the end of his journey.
However, being the tenacious and brilliant explorer he was, he first descended into the infernal circles, and his meticulous description of the punishments and torments that the damned were condemned to endure left his entire Divine Comedy permeated with a certain Gothic flair, if one could say so without desecrating the lights of genius, which made the deliberately atrocious part of the Poem much more interesting, rather than the idyllic and cushioned steps he takes in Paradise.

But what if Dante hadn't succeeded in reaching the company of angels and saints?
What would have happened?

This blasphemous curiosity is not ours to satisfy, but if we wanted to imagine its contours for about an hour or so, then we would necessarily have to put on stereo headphones, turn off the light, and listen to a band that revels in the excruciating suffering and unbearable crimes of hell like a fish: Skepticism.
This "Farmakon" I am describing is nothing more than this: a subversion of divine balances and the nature of man and things. Here, black will never turn white, nor even gray. It will remain an oily, tired, and sticky pitch, not even allowing the release of despair. A last hold on life, a final anchor for salvation that will not come.

If certain "Funeral Doom" bands, in fact, suggest some remote, albeit extremely distant exit from the tunnel of horrors that envelops those who love them, Skepticism holds a different opinion, and they never miss an opportunity to remind us. Theirs is not a descent into the abyss; it is simply a realization of how vacant and greedy for souls the abysses are. Nothing more.

Their stretched guitars, their drumming, which can only be classified as "Doom" in the fastest moments due to its slowness and exasperation, express nevertheless a different attitude or a different "feeling" towards the apocalyptic approach of a genre that already carries sometimes an incredibly devastating load.
The true keystone of their production, in fact, is not the granitic nature of the compositions or their oppressive rainbow of negative sensations. Not at all. On their shields, instead, is an imprinted dark patina that does not derive from the orthodoxy of sound geometries, and therefore "from the outside," but rather from everything expressed "between the lines." In that subtle combination of sensations and abstract things, music is nothing but an adornment, a starting point towards shores that only the mind can elaborate.

Let's be clear. In terms of material processes, this album is the ultimate power of Funeral Doom, with its terrifying "grunts" from a cave, its ethereal keyboards, and its effects from a 21st-century apocalypse. But there's something more. It's placed where it is precisely because it has to be, in a manner that's difficult to separate rationally, creating suspense, a feeling of disorienting pain that, on one hand, excites the nerves and stretches them, filling the stomach with anxious knots and pounding the temples, while on the other hand, lulls them as if under the influence of some opiate, transporting the listener, each time, to increasingly amorphous, distant, and decidedly darker places. And without any choice to decide whether to abandon them or not.

The decisive push towards this infernal mess of negativity is mainly provided by the organ that frequently appears in the songs ("The Raven and the Backward Funeral", "Farmakon Process"), but also by a drum with a muffled and intentionally approximate sound (at least in my opinion), which often does not hesitate to approach hinted tribalism, specifically speaking, in the untitled song placed at number four on the tracklist.
Perhaps it is precisely this untitled track that most embodies the army of demons Skepticism evokes in their album.
An experiment, where grunts are replaced by the anguished serpentine vocalizations of evil. Where everything is a mix of very slow and catacombal sounds that never end, and where, in the blackened cauldron of funeral music (rightly said), there is room for a sonic intransigence that, in comparison, makes other bands in the same genre seem like they're playing festive songs. And it's no joke.

However, I prefer to look at these avant-garde musings with an interested but somewhat suspicious eye, because I believe that, instead, the best episodes are expressed in the tracks where the canonicity of Doom becomes more explicit. Especially when it comes to the aforementioned "Farmakon Process", whose central riff excellently expresses what Skepticism is, managing to make the skin crawl. But also the last two songs, "Nowhere" and "Nothing", in their ominous duration, cannot be anything but extraordinary examples of "atmospheric minimalism", which alone outplay 80% of other groups' compositions.

Logical. Here we speak only of half-formed anthropomorphic and oneiric figures, perhaps owing something to a repeatedly emphasized Lovecraftian touch, to which everyone's imagination must give a complete face. But the fact remains that few succeed in the daunting task of painting such a tragic state of mind as Skepticism does.
Logical too that this album is a heavy brick in its leaden advance, suitable only for a very small minority of listeners. But for these, listening to such an album is better than any Paradise, because it's clear: Hell is far more tangible and concrete than any idealization and happy desire.