The second album from French doom metal outfit Fatum Elisum, Homo Nihilis again delivers an often harrowing combination of regal, classical doom and psychotic blackness that these guys have staked out since their 2009 debut. This time the look and feel of Fatum Elisum's dismal heaviness is even more disturbing, with singer EndE illustrating the album with his unsettling expressionistic paintings, and the band casting a grim, hateful gaze across the whole of the album�

Opener "Pulvis et Umbra Sumus" begins with the eerie sound of male voices joined together in Latin chant, their singing layered into a liturgical hymn that leads into the crushing doom metal of the song proper. Once the band kicks in, it's bone-rattling heaviness from the start, a classic European death/doom sound that touches on the epic misery of early Cathedral, Paradise Lost and My Dying Bride with slow, solemn guitar leads woven around the down tuned riffs, the band moving at a steady saurian pace and fronted by the almost operatic vocals of lead singer EndE. As with their last album, those vocals are intensely emotional and overwrought, delivered with dramatic vocal melodies and they fit this music perfectly with a feeling of funereal majesty. When they switch over to the deeper, more guttural death metal growling, the transformation is seamless, shifting the sound into a more monstrous massiveness. There are also parts where the band drops off into long stretches of somber guitar joined only by EndE's hushed growling, which in these moments vaguely reminds me of Carl McCoy from Fields Of The Nephilim. They pull off these shifts in intensity well, injecting a ton of emotion into their blackened doom without getting all weepy like so many bands do who try to tap into that early 90's Brit-doom sound. If anything, Fatum Elisum sound like a band at the moment of toppling over into monstrous darkness, their sorrowful, often gorgeous melodies and impassioned vocals often morphing into the crazed passages of death metal style riffage and blasting drums that appear on "The Twilight Prophet" and the title track. It's EndE's vocals that really give this it's insane feel, though, as he moves from Latin vocals, passages of intense crooning and guttural roars, shifting between English, Latin, French, and psychotic garble sometimes all in the same song, lending the music a distinctly schizophrenic quality. It hits a fever pitch on the last song "East Of Eden", the band suddenly blasts off into a jangling swarm of black metal as EndE's vocals rise up in a hysteric shriek reminiscent of Silencer, delivering the album's most fearsome performance.

Crushing, idiosyncratic death/doom, recommended for those with a taste for the sonic torment found with the likes of Ataraxie, Mourning Beloveth, Evoken, Paradise Lost, and early My Dying Bride...