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Damnatio Memoriae

by Grethor

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1.
Weep not for he who Is too not too numb to grieve, Yet sleep not, for this is a den of thieves As the sun melts, Into the hues of twilight The fantasy of peace dies calmly Into the uncertainty of night The moon is covered in a cloak of frigid, ever-moving clouds As the daylight of once was Slides into the shroud The chill of imminent doom Obscures the excitement of the unknown Fear and fascination of what is What should be seen or shown Yet in the avoidance of The natural and the obvious He chooses the way of malice To be negligent and oblivious Fooling ourselves to believe that Somehow a calm, quiet resolve Could overcome the basest needs Of a rabid mob of the devolved Nothing can be salient for Self-deluded, well-intended Hope for the silence That the clamoring ignorance Would never end in violence
2.
His body has softened in An unearned static quagmire It is a physique Unworthy of an empire Reliant on tools of fear And such massive self-destruction Resorting to moral corrosion In obfuscation and obstruction His fat, bearded, goose-stepping God of misinformation The one he conjures up, His profligate representation The surrogate of a rotten soul That he views in justification An overseer of his own repression In good faith, an awful place A place of discrimination A community that absolves itself The profligate cattle that stifles the march of progress Pinning us between the stones Of pseudo-intellectualism And totalitarian madness Stones upon stones Upon my constricted chest The archaic, the unforgiving Hypocritical words of confusion Only intended to oppress.
3.
I will not stand in defense Of a malignant society I will close my fists While holding in anticipation Of your false sentimentality I will scrutinize your every word I will deny your right to rule I will not endorse a culture of rhetoric I will not attempt to befool I will not acknowledge your supremacy Or kneel to your bellicosity I won’t fight your endless wars Nor will I rationalize atrocity Fuck your jingoism, Fuck your social constructs of privilege Fuck your false equivalencies Fuck your sycophantic peerage I rebuke your reign of terror I elevate the practice of sedition So fuck your fear mongering And fuck your stupid, archaic traditions Tyrants equivocate intolerance and destruction with justice They make you believe a doctrine Antithetical to what it should encompass I rebuke your ideology I rebuke your definition of charity For the actions of leaders and clergymen Have only created disparity
4.
To become an instrument Of another’s disdain To have fooled the world And causing others pain Lacking your own vision Completely without imagination A tool of a charlatan Into a hole of ruination The endless pit of self - loathing Made whole by another’s despair The cycle of ceaseless loneliness And pure malignity laid bare This is what you stood for To spread your sacred misery All are held hostage by it So you can declare victory The righteous quest for purity Derided in what you never achieved Unearned pride in myths proven false Then claim the right to be aggrieved Besieged by a pointless devotion To one’s own ethnicity When there is nothing special about you You must feign authenticity You value nothing beyond Your empty desire for validation Your unfulfilled uselessness An inadequate and deadly fixation
5.
The tales of glory Passed down through tradition Caught between the dangers of nature And a warrior‘s ambition Tales of wonder Great deeds and great victories Passed down by the warrior’s scribes Who were only dictated these stories The victors claimed what’s never truly theirs to begin with The propped themselves with majesty And claimed extraordinary prowess Mysteries and miracles And the blood of the innocent Somewhere between the tales And recalling the memory of the event Lies an endless trail of lives of the people it displaces The cruelty to build a legend On the backs of the erased The facade of nationalist directive Leaving a legacy of genocide The names of only places kept To humiliate those left behind Cruelty to even his own people When all the conquered are dead An irrelevant empire Until the husk of this earth is finally bled
6.
Words to bring the Ravenous will of millions, To pull in the murderous Desire of his minions, A preacher of fallacy The Glory of insincerity To twist an actuality Into distorted posterity The truth of creation Is not in his image His dominion over all Is now all but diminished Yet he demands our fealty He commands us all to forget A tradition of slaughter A cult of sanctioned murder Of which he will never admit In this proliferation lies power To commit genocide To discount all who have suffered And dared to have testified In this word is the agenda Of an ultimate lesson in dignity That one who lacks the skill To interpret his own reflection To look upon upon a continued journey And still acknowledge the imperfections To subjugate an entire people With but a word of exclusion Yet the burning of every brick and stone Built on an illusion It is with that subjugation That we come to terms with The finality of a revelation.
7.
Inconvenient to those born Chosen by divine right Those born under a yoke are robbed of such sight Kept in the darkness of empty promises of serendipity Pushed into the shadows, kept in a prison of endless complicity Endless in its circular, tranquil surface of banality But failure in its argument for its own iniquity Depravity becomes virtue, the blessed without the burden of empathy Girded loins of disposable lives Grateful for the boot heel Patronized by a mouth-piece, Doling out death with uncompromising zeal His promise of a higher stature just by virtue of birthplace The Lord’s chosen within hallowed border A testament to His grace Separate from the mansion So shall his servants burn But His word is the bond As the wheels of propaganda turn It is because it was willed to be Made into an object formed to perfect malignancy It was born from nothing It was forged by the hammer Of prophecy Made law by the power Of redundant mania And a tradition of false equivalencies
8.
I claim no foresight Nor the Shaman’s theatricality I promise no greater truth Than the toil of mortality Promises are as empty As the illusion of freedom Or of its tepid decree That is one that reinforces Its intent on finality One ideology does not cancel the other out It does not ever rationalize a spiritual war No matter how loud you shout If the intangibility becomes defense Then it is a war of idioms, And jingoism ensues And the propagandists control the argument And the death toll resumes He becomes weaponized madness Jack-booted, bible-toting, Willing to be honored in martyrdom In the absence of dignity The oppressed become oppressor When presented with the truth, Instead they worship authority
9.
It is with a dormant visage That I now lie in wait The seeds of dissent that I have sown In my melancholy state The brutalized can become brutal This much has always been true But it is through this mentorship That suffering can become virtue Pain as a teacher of strength Not all pain is an inhibitor Terror can be negated by suffering Nor all vision has to be singular There is freedom in a will To break free of all you held dear To liberate oneself from where Once once only held fear Mourning for a time that never was Always in the presence of truth That so many had broken their backs upon Expecting eye for an eye, Tooth for a tooth This punitive society, and The violent cycle it perpetuates More useless shame and regret Guilt as a weapon to wield and perpetrate All the wrong penalizations Insincerity is such a bore A movement that is without dissent Is one not worth fighting for
10.
Moving through the recesses of Thought to cut through the haze It is in this I must be perfectly clear, No civilization without a sense of preservation of culture Is one that deserves to be saved The poets die, the painters fall Into obscurity, time and again While power will commoditize Its messages appropriated for The purposes of being monetized Power controls the narrative So that none can speak the truth Wealth is beholden to none Snuffed out by what is easier than having to sacrifice The ever expanding imitation of life If we see no value In the purest forms of expression If we see only in terms of Entitlement and property We shall deserve no reward Under the false hope of prosperity It is not worth dying for a life of iniquity I have no interest in saving it Opting to burn it all down Start over again...
11.
This galvanized and marching Of the soldiers of repression They call the cadences of The defense of repression Who project his perceived wrongs Upon his perceived victimization He bangs the drum loudly For the march toward dehumanization The laziness of convenience That denigrates independence The gaggle of repeating, rhythmic Chants of hollow recompense Raging against our natural selves Against the tide’s forceful sway As the haze of the ashes clears And colors show through the grey Dead is the soul of such wishes And the reaching towards The Hand Invisible To right a ship of fools That writes it own eulogies on Intangible parchment and sinks Into an ocean of loathing To replace himself in his own domain Becomes the battle for his very soul Until only his emptiness remains

about

"With a band name derived from the Klingon version of Hell, Grethor mixes the dizzying riffs of Gorguts and early Morbid Angel with the blackened discord of Deathspell Omega."
----Sean Frasier, Decibel Magazine

"Taking a deceptively simple (but ultimately devastatingly complex) core of meaty, Death Metal riffs and wild, blasting drums, all blackened to a crisp and seasoned to sadistic perfection, and then layering this core with a variety of gruesome embellishments...the North Virginia quintet have whipped up a sound which, on the surface at least, seems to offer a plethora of familiar flavours designed to tantalise the tastebuds of anyone who enjoys feasting on the dark delights of bands like Morbid Angel, Deathspell Omega, and Gorguts..."
----Andy Synn, No Clean Singing

"The band has proven that they have the chops to compose a full album’s worth of intricate and memorable songs, in fact I’ll venture to say that Damnatio Memoriae has helped kick off 2018 with an album that will surely occupy a place in my top 10 for the year when it ends. It’s that good."
----Jimmy McNulty, Toilet ov Hell

Building on the strengths of 2015's Breakout EP Cloaked In Decay, Grethor returns in force with their first full-length album, a barrage of extreme metal that draws from death, black, and doom metal, with sharp focus on acuminous lyricsm and three-dimensionality in songwriting. Digital version icludes two bonus tracks: Anomaly X 2018 and All Praise The Blind 2018.

Released via Edgewood Arsenal Records.

credits

released January 26, 2018

Marcus Lawrence – Vocals
Tony Petrocelly – Rhythm Guitar, Bass
Brian Frost – Lead Guitar
Anthony Rouse - Drums

Guitar, bass, vocals, and drums tracked by Tony Petrocelly at Trepan Studios in Woodbridge, VA, Additional guitars tracked at StarAudio Studios in Chicago, IL by Brian Frost and Jason Draves.

Mixed and Mastered by Tony Petrocelly.

Artwork by Anton Semenov.
Layout by Tony Petrocelly.

Intro for ‘Embracing Oblivion’ composed by John Yentes.

All songs written by Grethor, except:
“Requiem for a Strawman” – written by Tony Petrocelly, Anthony Rouse, and Bobby Lute
“From This Rot so Shall We be Remade” – written by Rouse, Petrocelly, Lute
“Anomaly X” – written by Lute, Petrocelly
“All Praise the Blind” – written by Willy Rivera

All lyrics by Marcus Lawrence.

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Grethor Northern, Virginia

Black/death metal from Northern Virginia. Founded in 2007.

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