Californian duo Mordom sounds very much as oppressive and scary as their moniker implies and their logo appears. Moreover, from what I understand, while Nathan Gonzalez handles the battery for Mordom, Max Hoffman has put away guitars and uses bass as his main weapon of aural damage (although I still hear a lot of amplifier fuzz on some tracks on Cry of the Dying World). A short (comparatively) intermission The Fire is a quiet acoustic strum with gentle trembling whispering vocals, but the rest of Cry of the Dying World is monumental, monolithic, doomy and, yes, oppressive. When Mordom wants to drag you through pits, they truly know how. Combining Skepticism funeral pace, Sunn O))) low frequential attack and High on Fire booming bottom end, the opening halves of Narcosis, Betrayed and The Mausoleum move slow, with a wounded animal substituting for vocals. Mordom, however, doesn’t stop there. Instead, they make this ominous mass move, often with psychotic determination. Narcosis goes blasting out of nowhere, The Mausoleum undergoes monstrous hardcorish acceleration adding hysterical screams, while Betrayed starts thrashing, then goes into low frequency overload which ends up being both clear and reverberating. The common thread for all those Mordom movements though, they become both scary and breathtaking. Becoming rhythmic and riffy, Narcosis and Betrayed deploy bass guitar in almost a machine gun fashion propelling this mass along. And then, amidst these heavy moments, the compositions can all of a sudden produce somber melody (Narcosis) or crushing harmonic sequence closing The Mausoleum.

While writing this review I have deliberately omitted the use of paragraphs. I wanted the write up to morph into one giant, hard to decipher slab. This is what Mordom’s Cry of the Dying World makes you feel like. Confused, afraid, claustrophobic, with a few moments of hope, ultimately extinguished by the terrifying surroundings. Not for the weak of heart.