The (former) The evening-Double Guilherme Henriques (guitar, vocals) and Pedro Soares (drums) takes part with his second work Disintegrate Fine adjustments on the 2019 with Lone featured Funeral Death Doom.
The inevitable comparisons with Bell Witch the two Portuguese will not (want) to shake off because the duo’s second work in real Mirror Reaper-style consists of just one song – occupying the impressive (and ultimately amazingly entertaining!) volume of 45 minutes.
But the reference is still not a burden, Oak still have the class – and also the sound and the hermetically immersive atmosphere of a rich, multi-layered worldbuilding – to make big comparisons when the feeling of pure loneliness settles around the neck like a gratefully fulfilling millstone.
Disintegrate starts there, where about Dredg let their melancholy muse exhaling: a dreamy, nostalgically comforting melody revels along a sparkling guitar, under which the drums crawl with almost stoically colored reverb until Oak breaking the tidy network heroically, the hymnically clean figures that are symptomatic of Disintegrate are counteracted with sinister growls (which tear their teeth bared into depressive desire, vocally terrific deliver).
Commuting later Oak enter this mode between softly homogenized amplitudes that harmonize less like contrary extremes than the two sides of a coin: there are thoughtful retreats into quiet passages that reach into ambient and post-rock, and (more pronounced than before) self-confident to blackened – Gallop the reins tightening outbursts – but even when it rumbles and tacks, the dynamic comes from the background, everything obeys a painterly tragedy full of elegiac grace and reveling arcs of suspense.
Disintegrate slows down here and there to almost oppressive contemplative meditations, drags himself without despair with an engaging transience, which turns even the most threatening, actually most tormenting impressions into a cleansing catharsis with a downright optimistic ray of hope: the sad longing does not evoke catatonic hatred.
Especially the pull that opens up around the half-hour mark of the record still flattens with archaic power, but the resulting smooth Ethereal shimmer seems all the more redeeming, especially since the groove attracts and Disintegrate just developed a fulfilling weight in total. The fact that the cascade in the organic flow as a valuable odyssey does not develop the awe-inspiring mass of stylistic models and, when viewed in detail, also lacks the really (ingeniously) outstanding individual scenes, hardly moves into the focus of perception in view of the dense atmosphere (which is why also in terms of evaluation can be rounded up).
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