Good god, this is insane. By all appearances, we're looking at some kind of "funeral doom" with Bacterium. Cool minimal high-contrast album art, rad logo - holding the record in my hands, it looks like it could be a dungeon synth album. When this starts to play, though, oh boy. Kiss your momentum goodbye when throwing this slab of low-fidelity catacomb crawl onto your deck. This Irish trio features two of the guys from the obscure-yet-traumatizing raw doom metal outfit Wreck of the Hesperus, who I've been obsessed with for well over a decade; as Bacterium though, the sound is less bone-gnawing ugliness, and more crumbling churchyard ambience. Not that this isn't heavy as fuck - it is - but the heavy-duty use of low-fi "dungeon" synthesizer tones and eerie slow-motion electronic melody within the clanging, distant, dingy doom gives this is a uniquely rotted-out, moldering atmosphere. Raw, shambling, roughshod.

Spectral electronic tones and wispy choral sounds drift over the opening, wafting out of the depths. When the band fully kicks in on the opening title track, though, it's like slowly having your head squeezed between two blocks of concrete. This shit is heavy. Extreme slow motion death-doom slowed down even further. Creating this murky, muddled mass of weird warbling bass, saturated guitar distortion, sickeningly deep vocals, and this weird wavering quality to everything that makes Bacterium sound like the aural equivalent of a heat mirage. Man, this is titanic; the references the label makes to the music of bands like Skepticism and Thergothon are legitimate comparison points, these guys are definitely dwelling in a similarly bottomless well of septic sepulchral misery as those outfits. But the way that this is mixed, the way that the guitar and bass seems to be melting over that distant, barely perceptible drum kit that itself seems to be falling apart as this goes along...this is supremely warped sounding. Bizarre bleary funeral doom draped in huge pipe oragn drones and awash in hiss and echo, with these extremely weird and seemingly haphazard production choices that turn Sunt Lacrymae Rerum into a singularly warped and unconventional version of this style of heaviness. It's like there's a monolithic flanger pedal that the entire band is being pushed through, while all three offer up surreal vocals that vary from wordless chanting to bestial roars to harrowing screams of agony - the lyrics are great, quite poetic as they evoke visions of the sacred and the ancient, full of awestruck, void-worshipping despair.

And that synth, weaving and warping and wavering over the glacial metallic crawl, this strangely spacey dissonance that clashes with the messy drumming and bizarre song structures and acid-guitar licks. When the band locks into one of their riffs, it becomes MASSIVE, but then the music will begin to decompose into something increasingly looser, less structured, until everything melts down and it sounds like your listen to the amplified sound of mold growing along a limestone cavern wall. Those psych-dirge moments on "Sorites Paradox" are actually unexpectedly catchy, until the second half where it turns into this strangely ceremonial-sounding processional with just a spare drumbeat banging beneath the blear haze, until everything caves in again and we're buried beneath a crumbling mountain of malformed death-doom riffs, phlegmy shrieks, and that consistently shambling backbeat that feels like the drummer is slowly going to pieces under the weight of it all. Those psychedelic guitar noises and slithering leads continue through the ambient interlude "Dual Embodiment" and the crashing climactic crush of closer "Tumult in the Undertow", always surrounded by that whirring keyboard drone and odd electronic textures that will form into simple, funereal minor-key melody. And here's this cinematic quality to " Sunt Lacrymae Rerum" that makes for strange contrast with the band's lo-fi production and lumbering, chaotic performance. It's when those keyboards suddenly swell up into this cavernous majesty, this slips into a sublime weirdness. Fucked up, not the same kind of fucked-up as say Esoteric, but very fucked up. Sort of like listening to a third-generation Skepticism or Thergothon cassette dub that has been sitting in the back seat floor of your car all summer, with the heat and sun and humidity beating down on it. Turning it into a shambling, at times almost free-form mess of miserable slo-mo dirge, and the instruments warped out of shape, but retaining that core mournful grandeur.

I already knew that whatever this was going to sound like, I was going to dig it, being a fan of all three musicians and their previous projects. But no way did I predict that it would be this level of sonic slime and strange, subterranean avant-doom rawness. Fucking awesome.