Das Mörtal - Bury the Sorrow
Lisbon Lux Records
Released October 13th, 2023
Art about the difficulty of making art is a strange subgenre, inspired by a lack of inspiration. BURY THE SORROW, the new album from Chile-born, Montreal-based producer Das Mörtal, is an earnest exploration of the artist’s frustration and doubt, as well as the strange pressure on creatives in the lockdown days of the pandemic. All the best music evokes a landscape. Eyes closed, headphones in, where are you? In BURY THE SORROW, the landscape is an internal one. It’s becoming clear, with the pandemic finally fading into the rearview, that there was a real and distinct geography to the last few years.
In exploring the artist’s experience of the pandemic, the record uses the sounds typical to darkwave music, but with Das Mörtal’s flair for the unexpected. It swaggers lithely between haunting synthwave fugues and pounding German techno beats. Think Blade, or The Matrix, or really any movie where a leather-clad protagonist solves problems with a katana. The fifth track on the album, “Idöl,” is a perfect expression of its weird, paranoid, addictive energy. The voice droning robotically, over and over. The lyrics grounded in the artist’s palpable exhaustion and outrage: “Don’t you feel your ass been kissed enough? Don’t you want the beat to just fucking drop?” It’s an effective pairing: cool and candid, sexy and sincere. This vulnerability is more surprising for how uncommon it is in this genre. The music stands confidently alongside European darkwave masters like Carpenter Brut and Perturbator, but it’s the emotional core of the songs that makes BURY something special.
The album’s tone and pacing skate the edge of scattered and chaotic, a perfect representation of the artistic process during the pandemic. I remember a phone conversation with a musician friend in the depths of 2020, where he kept saying “I know I’m going to regret it if I don’t make my masterpiece.” Some artists thrive under that kind of pressure, but the majority, were left, as Das Mörtal puts it, “trying to produce more music during the pandemic but, mentally being unable.” The second track off BURY, “Wasted”, pairs a trap-infused beat with a surprisingly candid discussion of the struggles the musician faced with trying to produce art in the middle of complete isolation. Eyes closed, headphones in, feel the pulse of it like, an existential crisis in a Berlin nightclub. But, you know, in a fun, cool way.
- Josiah Snell
