Band:	Dola
Album:	Tabernakulum
Style:	Black metal, Doom metal
Release date:	December 06, 2024
A review by:	RaduP

01. Drzwi
02. Tabernakulum
03. Tysiąc Razy
04. Chimera
05. Tabernakulum Cz. II
06. Oszust
07. Nawet Nie Usłyszysz, Kiedy To Się Stanie
08. A Światłem Jest Gniew

After a more formless take on post-metal, Dola try to touch the ground with their feet again. But they end up making things even weirder.

The last time we caught up with Poland's Dola was three years ago when they released Czasy, an album whose atmospheric take on post-metal leaned into the avant-garde and something I could only describe as formless, and whose bleak atmosphere I praised a lot. That one felt like a noticeable contrast from their doomier self-titled debut, the one that got me into the band in the first place, though both already showcased a lack of care for following norms. At that point, the band could either continue its trajectory of pushing things further away from norms, or attempting to ground their music a bit more.

Tabernakulum, not to be mistaken for the Icelandic black metal album of a similar name, is leaning towards the latter, though calling it a grounded and norm-following album would be a huge mistake. Instead, ironic towards my quite irrelevant name similarity comment, Tabernakulum grounds some of the riffing towards a pretty groovy take on black metal, putting a bit more emphasis on the songs and the melodies within the songs as opposed to the sheer atmosphere of the music, but it also keeps thing feeling hard to pinpoint. It's not exactly "formless", because there is plenty of form. But those forms flow more freely than what genre conventions of post and black metal would require them to.

For as big of a sound as dissonant black metal has been in the past two decades and how often it has been associated with the forward-thinking-ness of being avant-garde, an album like Tabernakulum genuinely feels like it is using black metal's dissonance towards a sense of psychedelia that feels unique to Dola. Sure, the techniques it uses to unchain the blackened post sludge metal could be traced to jazz and post-rock and experimental rock, with the horns and the drumming especially taking a lot from the unchained experimentation of free jazz, but within the context of how Dola push them into structured and very engaging melodies, while keeping things feeling weird, especially in terms of the vocal performance done in Polish, in ways that remind of similarly weird recent Slavic metal from the likes of TDK or the band's countrymen in Gruzja, or what Furia tried and failed to do with W Śnialni.

Dola's skill at weaving this sound is worthy of huge praise, but what really works about Tabernakulum is finding the common DNA in the dissonance between black metal and experimental rock, and applying it towards their existing post-metal sound, and then making sure that every intoxicating out-there moment gets its weirdness compensated with a groovy fuzzy riff.