Band:	Cursed Cemetery
Album:	A Forgotten Epitaph
Style:	Black metal, Drone metal
Release date:	March 04, 2022
A review by:	RaduP

01. Daimon
02. A Forgotten Epitaph
03. Burned Anchor

If it comes to reviving old projects, Fulmineos couldn't have chosen better than to have Clouds' Khrudd join the eerie Cursed Cemetery.

Emi "Fulmineos" Matlak is a name one eventually encounters when getting into Romanian metal. Either due to his brief membership in Romania's greatest export, Negură Bunget, or due to his numerous projects, a lot of which having been one-man bands at some point. First starting out with the second-wave-black-metal worship Argus (ROM) in 1996, that would eventually turn into a myriad of other projects, and a lot of the music released in those first 15 years being pretty amateurish. Something did happen after the Negură Bunget stint that caused the quality to increase exponentially, with Kultika's post-metal, Katharos XIII' darkjazz, Dara's alternative folk, Ordinul Negru's black metal all being expanded on, often with new lineups and more mature sounds. I guess it was only a matter of time until the vault of old projects was reopened again, this time for Cursed Cemetery.

In a way, Cursed Cemetery is pretty hard to define musically, since each album is pretty different from its predecessor. Like a lot of the other projects like Kultika or Katharos XIII, Cursed Cemetery also started out as a black metal band, but one that would get a bit more of an ambient/noise/drone approach going. The second album turned the knobs a bit more towards doom and death, and the third one pretty much dropped the metal altogether in favor of something more downtempo and new age. When the project was revived with a secret lineup, it was pretty hard to guess how A Forgotten Epitaph would turn out. Though bassist M II, conveniently nicknamed as such to differentiate from M, the band's previous bassist; the bassist drummer was revealed to be Daniel "Khrudd" Neagoe of Clouds, Eye Of Solitude, and who has worked with Fulmineos previously in Fogland.

And even though vocals are pretty sparse, the timbre is so clearly Neagoe's, which is a pretty great thing considering how much of his music relies on his vocals. It's quite hard to put a label on what A Forgotten Epitaph is doing. It sounds like an ambient drone record made by a band that used to be a black metal band, but whose metal approach is now closer to doom, but whose approach to songwriting is more akin to a stoner band doing a lengthy jam. And indeed the songs are pretty lengthy, with three tracks spread out over the album's hourlong runtime, and the opening track takes around five minutes to properly get going from eerie ambiance into something less abstract. From that point on, the album shifts between being a jam and being the kind of ambiance you'd expect from a band called "Cursed Cemetery".

Is it a surprise that Cursed Cemetery's most mature record is a jam? Well, yes. There's bits of all the previous records in it, mostly 2012's Linear Black Trees, but this is what I'd call a proper reinvention. This is not only clearly the project's best record, but also it finally cleared the path to what I imagine Cursed Cemetery always should've been: compelling eerie music. If this time it came with a bit more post and doom, I'd say that's only for the better, because the contrast between the record's two sides is most of what makes A Forgotten Epitaph so compelling. Rarely does a record jump from dark ambient to blackened drone to doom to jammy post to blacknoise to funeral doom and still sound cohesive.