The album descends deep into themes of self-immolation, horror, and rebirth, and becomes a harrowing narrative as it moves through a series of different musical moods. OVERMARS had already established their atmospheric, electronically-tainted sludge-metal sound on their excellent 2005 album Affliction, Endocrine...Vertigo and all of the previous splits with DONEFOR, ISCARIOTE, FUGUE and ICOS, but Born Again is something new from the band; this forty-minute epic moves from pulverizing industrial dirge blanketed with heavily textured layers of processed guitar and fearsome gutteral roars intermixed with captivating female vocals, to passages of haunting dark ambience and bottom-heavy churn, and a magesterial finale that stretches gloom-ridden moody riffage, vaporous electronics and dramatic male/female singing across the song's final fifteen minutes, a tense, slow buildup that erupts into an earth-shaking crescendo of super heavy riffage. Immensely bleak and heavy, Born Again brings together elements of GODFLESH's industrial pummel, black metal, tribal dirge, the violent nihilism of SWANS, doomy death metal, and even some black strains of psychedelia into a monumental metallic black hole.
Review
Listening to this album can be described as a very long walk through a dark forest at night, or if you have exactly that sort of thing in mind, listening to this album while doing it can be a great experience. Going to a lonely spot somewhere, where you can enjoy solitude and peace, is also recommended. If you like drone or doom, this is the kind of album for you. If you like funeral doom of the more progressive type, you will immediately fall in love with this album. - Metal Observer 5/5
