Mournful Congregation - Incubus of Karma

The fourth full-length from Australian quartet Mournful Congregation finds them polishing the compositional aspects of their brand of black/funeral doom metal, but exchanging no mercy into its sprawling, gargantuan songs to do so. With six tracks just barely plateauing beneath the 80-minute mark, Incubus of Karmatakes a somber, cosmic, and spiritual journey via long-sustained guitar sections, echoed  percussion, and emotive vocal performances.

Much like Pallbearer’s Heartless  and Elder’s Reflections of a Floating World did last year, Incubus of Karma gradually erodes the stone walls of the heart away to penetrate it with a deeply meditative catharsis in a manner more patient than most metal like it. With the four cornerstone tracks of the album all around fifteen minutes or longer, the band take their time with each to not only build tension but maintain the self-control to not release it all in one short post-rock-crescendo-esque burst. Each song starts minimally and ascends slowly through a series of doomy strata spanning a variety of moods from mournful to somber triumph, all with simple dirge-y guitar passages, not overloaded with distortion, and drums that focus on maintaining the pace of the march rather than exploding into every metal drummer’s favorite speedy techniques. This isn’t to say that the album is all hum-drum boredom, as the song “Scripture of Exaltation and Punishment” indulges more fully in the blacker depths of doom metal (especially in the vocal department), while still creating and climbing a magnificent tower of emotion across its quarter-hour length.

The unwavering meditative pacing on the album is not without its detriments, however; the song “The Rubaiyat” is an example of the band’s funeral doom formula executed more fruitlessly than the rest of the songs surrounding it.

The album’s enormous 22-minute closer, “A Picture of the Devouring Gloom Devouring the Spheres of Being”, certainly ends it in cathartic fashion, leading with soaring background vocals and a soul-crushing guitar lead, the song disguises in no way its intent to wrench at the heart; and the emotive guitar harmonies at the end could not have ended the album in a more fitting manner.

Incubus of Karma is certainly a record with a great capacity to cultivate a contemplative atmosphere and speak through the tear-dripping guitar passages it strings throughout its epic length, but it’s also an album that makes no effort to hook one into its enlightening experience; it requires a perseverance of sorts on the part of its listeners, to not let themselves be distracted, across its massive run-time to fully immerse them in its dark, but uplifting, spacey, but tangibly spiritual catharsis.