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dustedmagazine · 4 years ago

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Sporae Autem Yuggoth — The Plague of the Aeons (Personal Records)

The Plague Of The Aeons by Sporae Autem Yuggoth

While The Plague of the Aeons, the new LP by Chilean death-doom band Sporae Autem Yuggoth, is unlikely to convince anyone who isn’t already game for a half-hour of rotten riffing and gastric laments, the record manages to successfully synthesize two long-standing obsessions in this sort of music: the cultic devotion to Tony Iommi’s guitar tone and mode of playing, and the whackier, more worrisome worship of Yog Sothothery, the Cthulhu myth system and cosmology. The supplication to early Black Sabbath is pretty self-evident: just press play. The lauding of Lovecraft is a little less explicit, but there’s no mistaking it once you see and hear it. Indeed, the band’s name looks like a rough Latin translation of Fungi from Yuggoth (1930), the sonnet cycle (yep) in which H.P. Lovecraft first refers to the distant planet Yuggoth—but you’re on your own with scanning the sonnets, and with investigating that fungus. For sure, the Chilean freaks in the band seem to have been infected by its spores, and judging by all the moaning and groaning, the results don’t sound like much fun at all.

For listeners of the music, the scenario may be a bit different. Turns out that this record provides a fair amount of weirdo pleasure, if you can access whatever may be “fun” in its spasms and reverberations. Opening track “The Malignant Observer” is more tuned in to the bluesy boogie of Sabbath’s “Into the Void” than the lumbering horror of “Iron Man.” That’s a counterintuitive move for a death-doom record to make, and The Plague of Aeons is better for it. Not that the song is going to make you want to actually get up and boogie. Sporae Autem Yuggoth’s music is more suited to the cough-syrup-and-Klonopin set than it is to folks who want to do shots of SoCo and rawk. But the band writes songs and riffs with a glacial sense of groove. That’s apt: Lovecraft positioned Yuggoth way, way out at the cold edge of space. It would take a really, really long time to get there. And the record gets more cosmically strange the further along you go. (You can insert your own joke about “Sweet Leaf” here.)

Still, The Plague of Aeons is a death-doom record. The vocals of Patricio Arraya complicate any gestures toward conventional melodic pleasure made by the riffs. His voice isn’t as awful as some in the genre, sounding more like a bullfrog with a sinus condition than a bull with twisted gut. But because of Sporae Autem Yuggoth’s subgenre loyalties and their allegiance to the Great Empire of Slime, Arraya’s vocal stylings are inevitable. Of course, as is the case with any doom-related music, the riff is the thing (and the real king), and guitarists Juan Drey and Jose Gallardo deliver. The slowest song on the record, appropriately titled “Crawling towards the Tyrant,” features the players in compelling interplay, deliberately increasing the riffing’s intensity for most of eight minutes, to the track’s crescendo. It’s not until the closing song, “Cathedral of the Abuser,” that the players really let loose, breaking into a mid-tempo stomp, soloing a bit and then sprinting (or at least galumphing) for a Big Finish.

The guys in Sporae Autem Yuggoth don’t seem to be interested in breaking new ground. They’re not even the first metal band to get to Yuggoth: see the musical adaptation of the sonnets by Foetor (if you must) and Electric Wizard’s canonical “Weird Tales” on Dopethrone. Lovecraft was a political reactionary, and metal this backward looking can get snared in a similar sort of unpleasant cleaving to “traditions” of various sorts. But this record is appealingly committed to its obsessions, and it sort of … pulsates with the players’ passions. Just try not to get any fungal yuck on you.

Jonathan Shaw

#Sporae Autem Yuggoth #The Plague of the Aeons #Personal Records #jonathan shaw #albumreview #dusted magazine #death metal #doom metal #metal #chile

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