Thursday 28th March 2024,
The Black Planet

O CERCO – A Desolação (EP)

12321469_1697755343773079_438109154484081698_nPortuguese band O CERCO comes this early 2016 with a new proposal: “A Desolação”, their second EP, out through Signal Rex.

To call it Post-Black Metal is reducing them to a level shorter than their musical range. First of all because you won’t find one single moment of light or hope during these 20 minutes. This work is definitely carved in black, as if all the images where dead and drawn with carbon stones. Also because there is some guitar complexity, namely on the first two tracks, with the percussion work not being to icy or cold, instead being side by side with the chords, in a warm ensemble.

And the screamo-like vocals push the band further than before, painting in apocalyptic scratches the faster parts of “O Colapso” and balancing the environment in a constant way that may even remind us of Esoteric’s Greg Chandler. As they seem to have create their own guitar tone, the muscled beginning of the second track “O Ocaso” is the most remarkable example of an evolution already felt since the band’s first work. And the ability to create somber passages even when playing slow tempos marks them as distinguishable act within the Portuguese BM scene.

The path towards nowhere continues in the final “A Desolação”, a rather lower-tempo song, where a constant appeal to misery and discomfort is undertaken, relying on 44’s dying shouts and a constant drum all the way. An undeniable approach to even more doomy fields, more present than ever before. In fact it is so close to the sounds of AGONIA that it becomes impossible to separate the two bands, the second one being formed also by O Cerco members and focusing on Cataclysmic Doom. Hence for us this last track from “A Desolação” sounds as if it was taken out from an Agonia EP. Not from O Cerco. Can we classify it as a slight misunderstanding? Perhaps. Great song and atmosphere though, so let’s see in what track will the band run in the near future.

7,5/10

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