Going from the titles of the songs alone, they do deliberately avoid any sense of grand bombastic epicness. ‘Anything But’ rolls off the tongue slightly differently than the gothic pomp of a title like ‘Woe Regains My Substance’ or ‘The Serpents Eats Its Tail’. Now, how does this intention translate musically to these four new songs?

‘Only an Expanse’ does not bother with any intros, but launches itself immediately into a blasting black metal section. Around a third way into the track, it slows down to a creeping crawl as his scream also deepens to a growl resounding in the abyss, before it picks up speed again in a mantra like drone.  He eschews any ambient experimentation here like he did on the ambitious, daring B-side of ‘Wit’s End’. Instead, he again leans very heavily on the stripped down black metal framework that was all but missing from said EP. That dynamic between a funereal pace and the blasting parts is what pushes this album forward.

‘No Place to Arrive’ constitutes a more familiar destination for funereal doom, hoisting itself onward at a snail pace with sluggish monolithic riffs and hammering drums. On the cadence of his desperate chanting, the odd melody line seeps in like a delicate ray of sunlight before that is all too swiftly crushed again under the weight of the droning rhythm. A gentle, acoustic interlude provides a short reprieve from the ensuing onslaught that finishes the song.

With only a mere eight and a half minutes, ‘Anything But’ is the shortest of the foursome.  However, this is, of course, anything but a short composition. It is just as much a fully self-sufficient work that veers between its two dejected styles and tempo. ‘Acceptance’, a fitting title for the last phase of a depressed, bleak record such as this, closes things off more or less in the same formula.

This similarity of structure across these 4 panels is at the core of this release.  People who expected Mizmor to go off into completely new waters, hinted at earlier in recent one offs and collaborations, might be a tad shaken here as ‘Prosaic’ is more about a refinement of the existing approach used on ‘Cairn’. Yet here they are applied to each song individually, rather than on the album as a whole, thus, making each one a universe that stands on its own, without direct connection to its sister songs.

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