Published: February 4, 2021

Omination are a funeral death/doom metal band based out of Tunisia, originally concieved by musician Fedor Kovalevsky in 2016 and later expanded to include his bandmates from progressive death metal act Vielikan. The influences for this project are only obvious for the sake of this spherical realm of keyboard/piano-heavy funeral death/doom being relatively small, though I would suggest ‘NGR’ (or, New Golgotha Repvbliq) has the brittle “on the verge” extremity of Finnish funeral doom metal especially down pat, particularly the best of (early) Tyranny and especially our beloved Profetus. Harsh, percussive, echoing, and hardly as minimal as one might expect from discussion of their influences Omination presents a stark, oppressed world in the throes of its prophesied downfall. My guess is that they’d learned some vital lessons on the ‘The Pale Horsemen’ EP from last year and infused more melodic sections to round out the experience. Grotesque, affecting, and soul-crushing in length ‘NGR’ recalls the very best of classic funeral doom taken to a maddeningly loud extreme and there is some considerable feat in pulling this style out of the shadows and into the post-apocalyptic fallout of mankind. If it is a cliché to suggest extreme doom metal is a pain that cleanses and strengthens the mind within its greater journey then I suppose it is because this thought fits so well within an 80+ minute grinding, cathedralesque opus such as this. The listening experience is topped off with a cover of Skepticism‘s “Nothing” from the yet underrated ‘Farmakon’ album, a deliriously deep cut moment which fits the mood and modus of this album quite well, ending on a truly sour, spacious note of dissent.