Sektarism – La Mort de l’Infidèle (Review)

Sektarism are a French doom band. This is their second album.

When an album is just three tracks and yet spans over an hour of material, you know you’re in for some properly slow doom dirges.

This is not your standard run-of-the-mill doom, however. Think along the lines of, maybe, funeral doom that’s been possessed by the spirits of dark ambient and drone, and forced into slow, ritualistic ceremonies of repetition and gradually-building terrorscapes.

In many ways this is the definition of an album that has a very narrow niche-appeal, not that this will unduly put-off connoisseurs of the style. Whether you can take a full hour of this kind of droning, chanting, pseudo-music is very much between you and your music player.

Like an occult, mutant version of Sunn 0))), Khanate, Bong, and Venowl, Sektarism don’t make music as much as they conduct rituals that just happen to have some musical instruments involved.

Although for the most part I did derive a perverse enjoyment from this, that’s very much not the point of a release like La Mort de l’Infidèle. This mainly falls into a similar category as a project such as Gridfailure for me – it’s not something I would normally stick on regularly, but when it’s playing I can’t help but get drawn into its dark world.

So, the question becomes – are you brave enough to find out if you can handle this?