Review by Nekrist on April 25, 2024.

Mizmor is a storm of extreme metal that made me reconsider the musical styles that I really like. In the past I never had direct contact with the music known by the term “drone metal”, the only point of reference I had for this style was the already well-known band “Sunn 0)))”. This album that bears the title of Yodh simply left me speechless, in the following lines I am going to try to condense and convey the feelings and sensations that this album managed to convey to me as best I can, since I must let out the ecstasy that I experienced encouraging others to listen and live the experience.

The atmosphere of the album is massive, oppressive, depressive, dissonant, crushing and desolate, it is like waking up on a planet or world that completely escapes any rational use of the perception of reality as we know it. In that world, we only see sinister monoliths like the ones we can see on the cover, made by the famous Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński. If his work had a soundtrack, Mizmor would be the most suitable entity for that purpose. As we walk through the shadowy and sonic lands of Yodh, we hear a work in voices that chill the blood, it sounds like a specter screaming in despair and lament through those gray and perverse depressive and crushing lunar landscapes, that perhaps Lovecraftian entity is terrifying, we cannot see it or understand the meaning of those gloomy remains, but we understand only one thing: whatever that being is, it is not happy at all.

Musically, it is an album full of spaced and minimalist nuances combined with some attacks typical of black metal, slow and creeping riffs with a decadent and pessimistic feeling, which reflect an overwhelming nihilism, the drums are precise and fulminating as needed by the different layers and nuances. that each song has. It is a suffocating and claustrophobic album at times, the atmospheric heaviness is overwhelming, dragging us into a miserable and apathetic world. The voices weave apocalyptic and frantic phrases, like sobs of deep and unbearable pain. Few albums of metal and extreme music in general have been able to transmit such a sentimental feeling in me, and even more so considering that the artist wanted to transmit an absolute emptiness, a feeling of supreme existential crisis after being disappointed and abandoned by the Christian faith ( “Mizmor” translates as “psalm” in Hebrew). This nuance adds an enigmatic touch to this work as a whole.

Words are not enough, although I hope that with this review I have been able to get someone else to listen to this album, sometimes we have to leave our comfort zone to discover amazing things that we would never have known, locked in our ignorance, a titanic work of extreme music.

Rating: 10 out of 10