I don’t recall feeling so lost and alone and surrounded by sorrow and desolation as much as I do when listening to Dopo L’Apnea, the debut self-released album of Italian apocalyptic crust band BUIOINGOLA. This album is massive and grand in so many ways, but that’s not exactly the description we’re going for right now. What we want to tell you about this album is how its intensity, heaviness and bleakness literally force you to your knees under the immense weight of a darkness impossible to withstand and then drags you by the ankles into an enormous oblivion of starving shadows. This album literally boils over with darkness and is so steeped in misery and loss that when sitting down to listen to it almost feels like madness and sadness start seeping through the walls and flooding the room. The music is grand and majestic, beautifully shrouded in an outer shell of sludge and doom that maintain the tempos very paced and dilated and the sounds monolithic and dense. But the heart of this work is what really shines of its own blinging light. What is hidden beneath is where the pulsing soul of this music lies and where the magic happens.
As the songs progress, ancient echoes of early Amebix and Antisect slither out. You can hear the raw emotion and desperation of No Sanctuary, as well as the rage and decadence of In Darkness, There Is No Choice re-materialize before your ears while listening, but at the same time everything sounds re-interpreted in an extremely modern and ambiguous way. The sonic contamination these guys have conceived to build their towering magma of sorrow and darkness is impressive and you will also notice that the entire work is infested with post-punk, gothic rock and death rock elements that bring to mind the desperate and desolate tones of bands like Bauhaus, Fields of the Nephilim and even The Cure. As if to embrace everything in this world that is sorrowful and helpless, the band have also branched out to some pretty obvious black metal elements and dragged them into their sound in a very subtle but intelligent way. Some moments of the album become icy, cold and extremely confrontational, thrust forward by furious rhythms and menacing riffs that recall the more atmospheric side of things when it comes to black metal, mainly the work of Altar of Plagues and Ash Borer. If you are familiar with and like the whole “neo-crust” phenomenon happening in Europe and brilliantly expressed by bands like Planks, Link, Fall of Efrafa, Red Apollo and the such, but also wish shit got darker and even more bleak and desolated, then you’ve just stumbled upon the holy grail of dark and depressed European hardcore punk. Words at times can not even express how sorrowful and beautifully intense this music is. An absolute fucking must of a listen that the band currently has for stream and download/sale through their Bandcamp profile.
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