If seventeen minutes of mournful anguish and painful sorrow such as in opening track of Mortualia, 'The Blue Silence', would test even the most tolerant of Samaritan or the most pessimistic misanthropist, then five tracks of dread, desolation, isolation, and the unremitting bleakness of an endless winter in just over seventy minutes doesn't bode well, now does it? Add to that Shatraug's idiosyncratic screams that are more cringe worthy than blood-curdling in their resemblance of alley cat's fighting over their piss-stained territory, and this album proves even more difficult to consume. The individual tracks, however, cannot be taken alone. The full depressive journey has to be ingested from bitter beginning to senseless end. That's not to say that there is the vaguest semblance of a narrative structure, it's more a corpus of torturous visions fused to form a whole, a malformed monster guiding the gaze from razor to wrist to razor. The funereal fog drifts through each track, shrouding each in an ever-deepening mystery that cunningly entices the listener into the valley of certain death. Mortualia falls more in the direction of depressing than depressive and will remain the remit of those familiar with Shatraug's work with Horna and Sargeist, or perhaps fans of Burzum and Sweden's Shining, for instance: a convincing work, but nothing really outstanding.
Track Listing:
1. The Blue Silence
2. In Bleak Loneliness
3. Cold and Grey
4. Devoid of Warmth
5. Forgotten Soul
6. Death Serenity (2011 edit)
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