Rigor Sardonicous - Vallis Ex Umbra De Mortuus [Paragon Records - 2008]Rigor Sardonicous make raw apocalyptic doom thats often reduces to a crawling sludge pace with highly impressive and downright terrifying guttural utterings that sound like a demon talking just at your ear. Add to this some creative and experimental touchers that makes this rather blackly pleasing for much of it’s running time. The band often weaving into their smothering and led weighted doom craft clanking percussive hits sounding like they could beign smashed out on either cemetery gates or an iron coffin, which really intensify's the tracks atmosphere. There are also some barren acostic gitar moments, dips in to medieval grim folk on the opening track and other creative sonic stokes that deepen their doom torture- such as a truly unnevering child or lost female call for help in Silens Somnium. The album does fall down slightly towards the middle as a few of the tracks feel like sludge doom by numbers, but it recovers for the superb last track Rex Regis Fortuna- with it’s crawling horror film riffing,deeply demonic chanting vocals and creative feedback edges and scab crusts. Unforgiving, nasty and dead shaking/ rising doom with it’s own distinctive demonic and often creative personality- just such a pity about the middle few tracks otherwise this would have got top marks.    Roger Batty
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