Mer Morte is a single unbroken thirty-four minute sludge-and-feedback feast that sprawls out even further into the dismal black void that these French doom junkies have been lurking in for the past six years. As with previous releases, Monarch move through massive blackened tar pits of low-end riff and sheets of gluey feedback that are stretched out into monolithic slabs of sound across "Mer Morte", a grim, glacial ultra-doom monolith that crawls at a saurian sub-tempo. It's the most droning, static, deathly doomdrone that Monarch have so far released, not really that propulsive, certainly very little of anything that you could call a "groove", but instead just floating, decaying and corrupted, massive rumbling crush hovering in a sea of yawning blackness.
And vocalist Emilie sounds as gaunt and ghostly as ever, her vocalizations materializing across the spatial doomscape as distant ululating wails, breathy whispers, and putrid death shrieks, at times disappearing almost completely into the black fug for minutes at a time, or lurking as a hushed lullaby whisper way off on the edges of the crushing subterranean thrum. At the same time, this disc captures the band at their most formless and distended, with long sections of droning buzz where the band collapses into waves of pure amp-rumble and minimalist percussion, smoldering black clouds of ghostly cooing vocals and howling feedback drone, and eerie tectonic melodies...definitely one of their most extreme and dismal slabs of doom yet, more ambient drone than doom really, but still completely CRUSHING.
