Cucurbitophobia - Umbrae Cruciatus Immanis: The Shadow Figures

Released: September 25

Just in time for Halloween season, Rob Benaquista brings us another Cucurbitophobia release with a bit of a peculiar structure. There are functionally three parts to this album beginning with the title track featuring a long bit of spoken word introducing us to the story and the atmosphere. The vocals provided by September Lynn Raven is somewhere in between prose and poetry, telling us about the man at the center of this story who is plagued by a number of apparitions that can not be explained by any reasonable inferences. There’s a bit of piano to start out with but that disappears rather quickly and is replaced by tense organ chords and deep thumps. The tone it sets out is immediately quite theatrical, giving off a Phantom of the Opera vibe with a bit more twisted undertones. It is quite an intro into an album with a deeper backstory than expected. 

The album keeps the theatrical tone throughout, even more so in the next series of tracks that follow. “Into the Foreboding Boscage” is made of three separate tracks named chapters one through three. Each one is similar in tone and composition, making for a rather meandering bit of piano driven horror classical atmospheres. But these three pieces make up the bulk of the of the album and feel like the background of a classic early horror movie, complete with trilling keys and uneasy chord shifts. This is a rather common element in the music of Cucurbitophobia, relying on more classical techniques and writing conventions rather than convoluted synth and sound design, which is something that I have always enjoyed as its not too common in what we would consider “scary” or “horror” music. The album concludes with “Nightmare Loop,” which takes a blended approach by keeping in those keys and bringing in a considerable amount of synth tones to make a rather dark ambient track with a neoclassical flair.