The Sorrow Of Being Immaculate – Suicide Forest
The Sorrow Of Being Immaculate – Suicide Forest
Drone Alone
Release Date: 26/09/25
Running Time: 45:02
Review by Dark Juan
8/10
It is a grim day at Crow Cottage. The wind is howling between the millstone grit buildings of West Yorkshire. The rain is sharp and lashes at your unprotected face while you scurry from one spot of cover to the next, dragging three very unimpressed Smellhounds with you because they are house doggos and do not like weather. As I sit and write this, a sense of melancholy creeps over me, even though I am disturbed by the sound of one of the furry idiots barking at unsuspecting, and probably quite moist and mildly irritated passers-by the front window every few minutes.
This does not help the mental ambience I am trying to create with the music I currently have on.
Have I told you all yet about the latest Smellhound? She is called Ivy, and she is a rescued black pug, that most METAL of dogs, and she is currently pressed tight against me. Mrs Dark Juan and I adopted her last week. She is also fucking adorable. I care not what people think. I love her and that’s all that matters. She’s an absolute twat to get into a coat for a walk though. She wriggles.
This, too, does not do any justice to the offering that has been placed reverently upon the slightly dusty and recently under-used Platter of Splatter ™. Yes, work has again been getting in the way of me actually having some fun, mainly in the form of the Regulation 45 report that has taken nearly three weeks to write. No-one told me that management actually involved responsibility, and I want my old job back.
I don’t really. I quite like having my own work to do and being left alone.
Anyhow, the furry idiots have finally settled down, so I can tell you about “Suicide Forest”, the first full-length record by the Welsh one-man murder spree that is The Sorrow Of Being Immaculate. Which is a fucking brilliant band name. They (because this is an anonymous project, but they are probably called Dave. I have a theory that, no matter where on the planet a band comes from, there has been a Dave in it. Even BabyMetal) play a punishing style of instrumental music that incorporates Sludge, Doom, and Drone. This is not a record for speed freaks. It is slow, and ponderous, and heavier than your mum fused with a steroid-fuelled Soviet powerlifter named Sergei, and then coated in osmium. It is torturous, and listening to “Suicide Forest” represents the musical equivalent of peine forte et dure. The sorrow and pain presses endlessly into you and crushes the enthusiasm and anticipation of good things out in a welter of horror, leaving only your crushed, barely conscious body behind.
It is fair to say, then, that Dark Juan is quite the fan, as he favours challenging music that makes him feel something, even if it is incipient depression.
It would also be fair to say that The Sorrow Of Being Immaculate don’t really play music. They create bleak and vast landscapes with sound, and intimate, disturbingly accurate aural representations of the dark thoughts and feelings that encompass us all at points throughout our lives, from the crushing sadness and despair one feels when a relationship breaks down and you are stuck while your love moves on (’30 Years of Nothing’, being a steadily and disturbingly intense drone that merely increases in power as you listen to it) through to musical ruminations about Aokigahara Forest (which the album is named after, fact fans, because so many Japanese people go there to end their lives) – ‘Suicide Forest’ and ‘Sea of Trees’ reflect this place and the aching gulf in the soul that leads to suicide with endlessly repeating riffs and twisting, knot-like, uncomfortable emotional spaces where bleakness and pain is all that you see, and there is no more hope…
I’d love to say that the record then picks it up a notch and releases the tension with something a little more jaunty. Except it doesn’t. It turns up the intensity further with ‘TheEndlessBackgroundLowLevelHumofAnxiety’ which is eight minutes of uncomfortable dissonance and electronic droning that sits in the back of your brain and eats away at your sanity. It represents futility, in Dark Juan’s head anyway, as the music doesn’t actually resolve into anything, it just hums uncomfortably away, like the flickering and buzzing of fluorescent lights in abandoned and empty open-plan offices, where you do not know what eldritch horrors are lurking in the shadows by the water cooler, or stalking you through the endless partitions, walls painted a sickly, greenish magnolia and the air conditioning making you both sleepy and cold at the same time. It is liminal sound, neither in one place or the other, like a careful person lingering undecided at a door, debating whether to enter or flee.
The record ends with a demo version of the title track, which started the album. This neatly portmanteaus the record, with the same insistent riff and lead chime, but taken right back to a skeletal form, all pretension and embellishment stripped away, leaving only the functional. It is arguably the more powerful version of the piece, as it is unalloyed hopelessness made into music whereas the full piece has artifice woven into it, and has more depth, yet is still cold and hard. There are no vocals on the record at all, and little humanity, there is only stark and jarring silence where a voice would be.
In short, if you have emotional problems, I would suggest you stay away from The Sorrow of Being Immaculate. They are not going to cheer you up or make you feel better. What they will do, though, is take you to the dark places in your soul and force you to confront and explore them before deciding that action is not yet to be taken, because you are just so fucking tired of the shit that is going on around you and all you want to do is sit alone in silence, in the blackness of a room without light, and stay the fuck there because nothing can touch you if you don’t do anything.
We have all been there.
The rather more chastened than usual Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (System raddio chwistrelliad gwaed Dark Juan patent, ar gyfer fy ffrindiau sy’n siarad Cymraeg. Dw i’n gwybod bod hwn yn ofnadwy o Gymraeg, ond bydd yn rhaid i chi faddau i mi. Dw i’n Sais wedi’r cyfan, ac felly’n gwbl anwybodus o un o’r ieithoedd Celtaidd hynaf sy’n bodoli, er fy mod i o’r farn y dylwn i o leiaf wneud yr ymdrech! Rwy’n ymwybodol fy mod i, yn ôl pob tebyg, wedi difetha eich iaith hardd y tu hwnt i bob adnabyddiaeth!) awards The Sorrow Of Being Immaculate 8/10 for a deeply idiosyncratic and probably very personal recording that is still able to beguile even as it takes the joy from you. If you like SUNN O))) and Electric Wizard you may well dig this.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Suicide Forest
02. Sea of Trees
03. 30 Years of Nothing
04. Oath Of Decay
05. Decadent Self Immolation
06. Misery
07. TheEndlessBackgroundLowLevelHumofAnxiety
08. Winter Delusion
09. Funeral Home Drone
10. The Eye of the Goat
11. Suicide Forest DEMO
LINE-UP:
There is a person behind this. I have that on good authority.
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
