Review by Lawrence Stillman on October 9, 2024.

Senthil is a band I know almost nothing about thanks to their secretive nature, and even without a full-length album throughout the band's lifespan, they did have some really gnarly music that can instill fear in the most hardened listeners of extreme music. This EP from them exhibits the best of their music in a short, 23-minute track (by short, I mean short by funeral doom standards).

Being funeral doom, the music here is very slow and droning. But accompanying that music were some distorted and wretched screams that sounded like someone having their flesh ripped off and dying. It clues you in that this is no ordinary funeral doom, just pure despair, and creepiness that is compounded by the cover art, which is an infant being stripped down to the bone and placed in an open coffin, implying that the infant was left there to die. There is nothing much to say about the music besides that, since the entire track mostly stayed the same, being funeral doom and all.

The instruments here do not differ much from most other funeral doom bands; very slow drums and droning guitars are staples here. But the wretched and painful vocals do turn this EP from generic to nightmare fuel, which is quite a gnarly experience. While the drums sound painfully obvious that they are programmed, they are slow enough that it was more of an artistic direction or laziness than trying to cheap out on a real drummer. The guitar reverbs are where the "noise" part in the title came from; the EP is drenched in reverb, which makes this EP more suffocating and unbearable to sit through, which might be the purpose of this EP.

I like this EP a lot, believe it or not. Sometimes I want something truly gnarly and nightmarish to scare myself at night, and I guess this EP might just do the trick. I definitely do not recommend this to anyone not familiar with the more extreme side of funeral doom; it is slow and droning while also being constructed by pure nightmare fuel.

Rating: 8.5 out of 10