It won’t take much to win me over after you bring two of my favorite things, doom
metal and H.P. Lovecraft together. Not the first time they have been coupled, by here
it’s being done with little melodrama a large dose vocals so raspy and nasty you
might think the singer is being turned into an aspect of Dagon as he croaks and
gasps his guts out. A few low chanted vocals also color the rumble of this gloomy
lethargy, but wretched despair is the order of the day. If you can dig into your
nightmares and try to fathom how something could sound even darker than this,
you would find it is the sound of demon disembowelment that occurs on the second
song.
Unlike many doom bands today these guys focus on the lost art of song writing and
do not feel obligated to write songs over ten minutes, because they are too stoned to
do more than wander around. This is not to say they are not capable of summoning
an ambiance, they do so without having to sacrifice the integrity of the song.
"Usurpers" lets the pound of the drum linger, but still stays under seven minutes.
Atmosphere hangs off this song like cobwebs dripping with slime. They excel in
being as heavy sonically as they are metal. A metallic cloud of noise rolls in on the
overwhelmingly oppressive "Deficient". This song works off of a similar throb the
band has run with for the bulk of the album up to this point, but four minutes in I
begin to question this, wondering if it needs something more dynamic to break
things up.
The longest song comes in at ten minutes and carries a more funeral doom like
guitar melody that floats over it. The snare sound on this song has more of a raw
snap to it. The song wallows in the distortion of the final minutes. "Seeping Wombs"
has a more sinewy riff it coated in fuzz and tramples you under it's weight, but
doesn't do much more to provide a greater sense of dynamics to the album as a
whole. Going into this know that for the duration you are in for crushing doom with
the filth of death metal coating it. These guys should get props for having some of
the wickedest growls set to record this year. Normally after a few songs growling
can get old for me if it is not varied yet here it works making this one of the ugliest
doom releases of the year.