Glancing at the cover, one might easily be persuaded by Hic Iacet's 2 track EP ''Prophecy Of Doom''. A grotesquely engraved image of two ritual necromancers merging as their freakish tentacles coil and reveal a nebulous vortex, all the while an inverted illuminati with a masochist serpent encircling it, stares at the owner of this brief recall to blasphemy, power flushing out. Hic Iacet's 2011 demo ''Hedonist Of The Death'' was a highly potent excursion which successfully put raw black metal and murkier black/death tendencies into practice withing one wholesome package. I was naturally delighted by the demo, perhaps another offspring of the overly prolific occult black metal genre but still high in quality, and the Spaniards's retinue expands as they sign to Hell's Headbangers to harvest and later on, expose more hellish, churning material, yet the EP is not all terrific news for keen followers, because ''Prophecy Of Doom'' introduces aspects that fervent listeners may not like after the prior release.
As on ''Hedonist Of The Death'' the Spaniards heavily incline towards the process of gloom, whether it be scrutinizing the element or spicing it up with different ingredients, yet here, there's a relatively different sustain on completely ferocious, raw aggression. The band's propensity for being able to effortlessly induce loom and cavernous ambiances with the singular use of distortion guitars cranked up sky-high and additional elements of resonance is still the highlight of the EP but the riffs have a more lurching, serpentine taste to them rather than straightforward, gnawing hostility and by simply blotting out the main crispness of the guitars with the vocalist's cavernous growling timbre, Hic Iacet can keep the listener semi-indulged at all times, even if there's hardly any subtext of immense evil. The guitars plod along with pure early 90's death metal ferocity, pretty much what you'd hear from early Death, Incantation, Autopsy or Winter and old Fleshcrawl, venturing into a near-doom metal spectrum, which, admittedly, while still implying strong somnolence onto the listener, still kills much of the primal energy to be found on the demo.
The compositions aren't really funereal, after some point they're simply abridged for obvious risks of boredom, and albeit an eleven minute EP may not cause a listener to doze off, the expenditure of the EP may cause some unwanted banality, one that, amid hundreds of other cavern-dwellers, the occasional death metal revival fan would not want to put up with. The band may truly be up to something promising here: If they scatter the two puzzles they've made and join the pieces to form one queer amalgamation, they can actually turn on the metal community more than you'd care to imagine; drowsy, black-ish death/doom patterns rumbling along the cavernous echoes of the vocalist's great reverb while ruptures of shattering raw strength sway back and forth, a mire of miasma. That said, there will still be a few who will dig this for its massive nature and crude display of death and black metal or its mutual resemblance to Hic Iacet's countrymen and acknowledged blasphemers Teitanblood and Proclamation. Definitely worth a spin or three.
Highlights
Elevation of Sun
Prophecy of Doom
Rating: 76,5%
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