The line between doom-death and funeral doom blurs with this release since there is relatively little death metal or phrasal riffs, and more of the approach Skepticism and Thergothon took with slow even chording of overlapping tone progressions overlaid with lead melodic rhythm guitar.
Bad doom metal focuses on aesthetic and technique to create a mood for consumers to purchase the way you would clothing at an outlet mall. Good doom metal subtly manipulates mood throughout the course of a piece in order to create the impression of expanding depth within a singular atmosphere.
Working within the liminal ground between death metal and doom metal, Swiss depressive onslaught Excruciation bring out their latest, which works funeral doom pacing and grindcore riffing to the doom-death genre, removing excess to leave a plain and sub-lingual mood of futile antagonism and existential anomie.
Coming to us from the wilds of Sicily, Morticula Rex derive their influences from classic heavy metal and death metal, but create a style of doom-death with the same heavy metal influences that drove the Greek and Sardinian scenes to have unique voices, even if hybridized ones.
Genres are like corporations: they move from innovation to participation to cash cow, at which point noone knows where to go and they simply aggregate everything that has not failed. Miasmal Sabbath bring together rushing death metal, d-beat punk, and Autopsy-styled necrotic doom-death into a listenable package.
Old school doom-death with a strong tendency toward bounding grindcore riffs, Pazuzu understands how to make a riff salad talk to itself and how to use enough internal contrast to keep the unfolding story that results interesting. Like a good horror movie, Revenant Of Blasphemies alternates between suspense, terror, flight, and violence.
Seven Metal Inches Records is re-issuing the 1990 Derketa EP Premature Burial as part of the label’s “Unearth The Underground series Pt. III” series of classic underground metal back in print.
After having hidden in obscurity for a short while, Chicago death/grind band Cianide returns with some of its darkest material to date. The track kicks off with an Autopsy-styled introduction, then detours into Deathstrike-style Motorhead-influenced riding rhythms before venturing into Celtic Frost territory.
Relapse Records posted a new track, “Loathe”, from Obituary’s upcoming Ten Thousand Ways to Die album their Bandcamp page. It’s quite bland I assure you.
In the world of old school death metal, few manage to revive the past and carry it forward in a unique voice. Desecresy resurrects the greatness and gives it a unique spin with atmospheric lead melodic guitar droning over death metal and doom-death riffs, and on Stoic Death they increase the variety of death metal riffs and the dynamic impact of songs in a style more like that of their first album, Arches of Entropy.
Stoic Death begins at full speed and continues to vary pace throughout in order to build intensity, applying the resonant melodies selectively like layers, enwrapping the surging power chord riffs in sheets of harmonic background that intensifies at crucial moments in each song. The doom-death influence shows its strength most in the careful pacing of each song and introduction of elements like seasons, cycling to a conclusion.
The increased variety of riff types shows a familiarity with death metal of the oldest school, but now they take on a new language, with Asphyx-style percussive riffs sliding into rolling Bolt Thrower style dirges, and then emerging with the powerful Finnish-style death metal riffs anchored in melody that specialize in crucifying beauty with cruelty. The mid-paced approach might seem to kill aggression, but it has replaced that sentiment with a deepening sense of melancholy, dread and suspension of all normalcy as the bizarre becomes sensible.
This album feels like a descent into a tunnel shrouded in darkness, where as the voyager goes deeper both in the ground and behind the layers of twists and turns, the daylight world seems more remote and unreal. The songwriting technique Desecresy has made into their trademark presents challenges in that the overall sound is similar between tracks, but here the band differentiates them with elegance and creates a complexity of texture in which the listener can gratefully lose themselves.
More Godflesh influences permeate this album as do nods to recent changes in metal toward the more atmospheric, but Desecrey channel these into its own voice, translating the insipid into the ambiguous and the comforting into a threatening lack of center. What emerges from that fertile combination is a voice perfect for this time, a great sea of doubt in which glimpses of beauty are hidden behind primal uncertainty. Like the best of metal, it makes greatness from conflict and then shows the wisdom of that atavistic outlook through precisely-architected composition.