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PESTILENGTH
Solar Clorex

Debemur Morti Productions (2024)
Rating: 7.5/10

Basque Country duo Pestilength returns with their third full-length album. Solar Clorex is another slab of horrifying deathliness, one which I enjoy musically but not vocally.

It’s often tough to review albums when there is one particular detail that doesn’t sit comfortably with me, and in this instance it is the voice; a grating gurgling that sounds like a pig with phlegm and not necessarily fitting to what is a blackened, doomy clank of a platter. However, Solar Clorex remains a potent opus that is a lot crisper and less suffocating than I imagined it would be. Even so, the album is riddled with dramatic dissonance such as on the stark ‘Choirs Of None’.

I much prefer bands of this ilk when they shift out of their comfort zones and provide glinting, twisted passages of utmost doom. ‘Dilution Haep’ is a good example of that traipsing weirdness that Pestilength can inject into their already bleak landscape. I could quite easily prefer this album as an instrumental pasture because the trajectory of the music is so much more interesting without those generic throat spurts. ‘Enthronos Wormwomb’ is another of those lumbering heaps of gloomy menace that musically twists your membranes.

At their most rampant, Pestilength produce songs like ‘Occlusive’, a black-death flurry of ear-melting percussion and blizzard riffs, so even with these two extremes the band still instils a sense of dread and foreboding. Solar Clorex is still an almighty tome even with its flaws, although I’m sure many will find much to savour from the growls.

Neil Arnold

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