The most interesting releases of the week!
Death Never Sleeps, Glorious Depravity‘s second full-length, was released on Transcending Obscurity Records. The album starts off with a thunderous drum solo before serving an album full of nasty, fully stuffed death metal. The riffs smell a bit like Scream Bloody Gore at times and like their own brand of gore at others. The rest of the songwriting confirms Glorious Depravity as the masters that they are; with a group as star-studded as this, it’d be disappointing if they didn’t make some impressive pockets of music.
With respect to the other band members, Doug Moore and Chris Grigg give such amazing performances on vocals and drums, respectively, that it can be hard to think about else. The full and vibrant beats underneath the wild and over-the-top growls create some lasting memories. The most fun release of the week.
Primordial Reverie is an instrumental progressive metal album with plenty going on. The obvious inspirations here are bands like Haken and Dream Theater, complete with the excessive song lengths. There are a few passages that feel like they could have used either a vocalist or at least a lead instrument. Overall though, Cepheidae Variable have created a large and engrossing project.
It’s easy for instrumental metal, and for progressive metal, to lose their emotional punch in a pile of clever passages. Ryan Koepke does an excellent job maintaining poignancy throughout Primordial Reverie‘s hour-ish run time. This album does feel like a singular journey that takes the listener into different emotional headspaces as the music unfolds.
So few bands even attempt funeral doom that it’s always a delight when a solid release comes into existence. Oromet‘s second full-length, released on Hypaethral Records, evokes bands such as Ahab in sound as well as imagery. The three massive tracks are all exhausting, ravaging experiences.
My lasting impression of this album is the end of “Forsaken Tarn.” Obviously the first few moments and the last few moments are generally going to stick in the listener’s mind for better or for worse, but the finale of The Sinking Isle just lays down a beautiful melody with huge, dramatic drum hits that maximize the depth of the album’s sound before Oromet slowly shift into a much more contemplative, calm style using the same main riff over the course of several minutes. It’s the sort of thing that only funeral doom can do, and when done well as it is here, there’s nothing like it in the world. The Sunken Isle is up there with Evoken‘s Mendacium as one of the best funeral doom albums of the year.
It makes sense that Insidius now share a drummer with Vader. Released on Black Lion Records, Vulgus Illustrata is the polish death metal band’s third full-length release. Insidius play aggressive, hectic and busy death metal that punishes the ears. The band gives impressively sharp performances while playing at full throttle.
Despite the glaring, harsh sounds and repeated abuse of the snare drum, the quick-fire resolution of the band’s riffs drives Vulgus Illustrata. Insidius rapidly establish a riff, ratchet parts of it up or down a step or a half-step, and then resolve the dissonance by the end of the passage. While this isn’t a shocking or revelatory practice in death metal, Insidius do it so often and so completely that it becomes something to hold onto as the music blasts by you. The blend of fury and structure on Vulgus Illustrata serves the listener well and creates an experience worth returning to.
