Reviews    Until Death Overtakes Me - Prelude to Monolith (Firebox Records)
by Chris Barnes

I'm getting to be a big fan of the Firebox label... everything I've heard, while inciting fits of cavernous depression, is top quality from music to packaging. Like I've said a million times before, I love the Finns. I wonder how one can quantify depression and doom in a nation's gross national output. Finland would have a monopoly.

Until Death Overtakes Me, the project of one Belgium musician Stijn Van Cauter, puts a new twist to the funeral doom genre. Each one of the five compositions is slow, harrowing and epic in reminding me a bit of Norwegian doom master Hlidolf's work with a bit of that Skepticism vibe. The UDOM way, however, is to compose primarily on the keyboard and bathe each work in currents of trebly black metal-like guitar giving the songs on Prelude to Monolith and even more unearthly, occult type of sound. A touch that I really like is the use of no percussion except for that of a timpani. The result is almost 70 minutes of ambient funeral doom as if it was composed by Richard Wagner. Slow, depressing but astonishingly epic. The picture in my mind as I listened to this all the way through was some medieval druid walking on fog layered highlands, castle ruins in the background hiding occult rituals of the most sordid.

Yeah, I know. I've got a vivid imagination. But the mere fact that UDOM took me to another place for over an hour is a testament to the power of Mr. Van Cauter as a musician.

Very nicely done. A rich work that gives healthy doses of credibility to the doom metal genre.

Track Listing
1. Prelude to Monolith 2:25
2. Missing 21:45
3. Absence of Life 15:21
4. Slip Away 19:44
5. Marche Funebre 8:45


Purchase Prelude to Monolith at the Hellride Music Super Store

Listen to a Real Audio sample of Prelude to Monolith

Visit the UDOM website at www.udom.darkwood.com

Copyright 2002 HellrideMusic.com
Review by Chris Barnes 6/1/03