Clairvoyance – Chasm of Immurement Review

By Maddog

Yes, I picked this up entirely because of its cover. Girardi’s gorgeous spiral of tombstones and skeletons conjures vintage highbrow death metal of the likes of Death. The title Chasm of Immurement grasps at brutal badassery in the vein of Suffocation’s Effigy of the Forgotten. Clairvoyance’s logo remains indecipherable even if you know the band’s name, suggesting kvltness galore. The promo materials describe lyrics that address the isolating effects of depression, foreshadowing a harrowing listen. In isolation, each of these judgments strikes at the truth but glances off. Chasm of Immurement is the debut album from Poland’s Clairvoyance, an unknown band comprising unknown musicians. Lying at the intersection of brainless death-doom and brainiac digressions, Chasm of Immurement is a powerful foray into death metal.

A first pass through Chasm of Immurement suggests primitive death metal with a dollop of doom. “Eternal Blaze” opens the album with a bang that recalls Faceless Burial’s Speciation. After grabbing me by the anus, Clairvoyance maintains its hold by alternating between mid-range Obituary riffs and lurching Autopsy-style death-doom. These lowbrow highlights feel both as slimy and evolved as an amoeba. With both its riffs and its guitar tone, Chasm of Immurement leaves a palpable layer of grime that justifies multiple colonoscopies. “Blood Divine” emerges as a late gem through riffs that are gory enough to draw blood and enormous enough to evoke Immolation. This isn’t isolated to a subset of the tracks; throughout its runtime, Chasm of Immurement alternates between a sixteen-wheeler and a used minivan without dulling its fun.

On your fifth listen, Clairvoyance’s experimental bent comes into view. The same doomy riffs you’d heard before reveal spooky foreground melodies (“Reign of Silence”). The same track that you’d interpreted as a caveman ditty blossoms in baffling melodic directions in its second half (“Eternal Blaze”). The same song that introduced itself as by-the-books death metal culminates in a monstrous doomy climax (“Fleshmachine”). The same sections that you’d dismissed as repetitive transform into home bases for grimy excursions, interfering with your sleep schedule and your family obligations. Adorning hefty riffs with sinister melodies, Clairvoyance recalls both Lovecraft’s Azathoth and Morbid Angel’s Trey Azagthoth. It took me a while to realize that I was doing Chasm of Immurement an injustice by pigeonholing it into old-school death metal. It is indeed that, but it’s so much more.

Clairvoyance’s varying ambitions both empower and dilute each other. Spanning 34 minutes across 6 tracks, Chasm of Immurement is a concise collection of lengthy tracks. Some of its pieces wander, especially at their simplest. For instance, despite being the second shortest track, “Blood Divine” feels lengthy because of its dearth of creative ideas. Similarly, the shortest song, “Eternal Blaze,” suffers from riffwork that’s decent but unimaginative, before eventually redeeming itself with more variety. Even so, these flubs are rare. The six-minute “Hymn of the Befouled” is the starkest counterexample, balancing length with girth by combining a vicious off-kilter main riff with melodic escapades that hold me rapt. Parts of Chasm of Immurement could do a better job of remaining engaging, but it’s hardly a fatal flaw.

Balancing thoughtful death metal and anti-intellectual death-doom, Clairvoyance’s debut is as weird as it is powerful. Neanderthals who need their fix should look here, as Chasm of Immurement’s crushing death metal riffs rival the best of old-school death metal. Conversely, fans of Morbid Angel’s wonkiness or Tomb Mold’s shapeshifting shenanigans will find just as much to love here. Chasm of Immurement is unlikely to dethrone Faithxtractor’s Loathing and the Noose atop my 2025 death metal ranking, as its occasional meandering loses my interest. But it’s a promising debut from a crew of talented Polish fiends.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Carbonized Records
Websites: carbonizedrecords.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/clairvoyancedeathmetal
Releases Worldwide: July 18th, 2025

#2025 #35 #Autopsy #BrutalDeath #BrutalDeathMetal #CarbonizedRecords #ChasmOfImmurement #Clairvoyance #Death #DeathDoom #DeathMetal #DeathDoomMetal #FacelessBurial #Immolation #Jul25 #MorbidAngel #Obituary #PolishMetal #ProgDeath #ProgressiveDeath #ProgressiveDeathMetal #Review #Reviews #Suffocation #TombMold

Vile Rites – Senescence Review

By Iceberg

I don’t often reach for OSDM revival promos, a genre I feel has been discovered, explored, conquered, and overrun. Fate had other things in mind for me, it seems when I found Vile Rites’ proper debut Senescence. Drawn to its label of “progressive death metal,” imagine my surprise when I found a sea of neo-OSDM lurking beneath. The Santa Rosa trio dipped their toes in the scene with 2022’s EP The Ageless and spent their time touring that record to perfect their coming-out opus, Senescence. As a member of the AMG Inc. Hydro Homies™, I’m duty-bound to snag any aquatic cover. So with Senescence in my icy grasp, I eagerly let the sounds of “Only Silence Follows” wash over me.

Vile Rites’ ability to seamlessly blend OSDM influences into their signature sound shows wisdom beyond the band’s years. You’ll find the foundational elements of Floridian Death Metal–Morbid Angel and Death chainsaw riffs and blistering backbeats–especially in the warm-up routine of opener “Only Silence Follows.” But as the album progresses Vile Rites stretch the edges of the music, toying with odd-time signature passages and whiplash tempo shifts that remind me of the proggier moments of Gorguts, or a less frenetic Faceless Burial (“Senescence,” “Shiftless Wanderings”). The trio is a favored format for this style of death metal, and Vile Rites use their limited lineup skillfully. Skinsman Aerie Johnson wears the OSDM and prog hats equally well, straddling the line somewhere between Richard Christie and Between The Buried And Me’s Blake Richardson. Bandleader, guitarist, and vocalist Alex Miletich excels on all three fronts, delivering a pleasantly discernible death roar, alongside notable solos that form the center of nearly every track here. Stephen Coon’s bass performance is magnificent, taking the lead on melodies as often as supporting the harmonic structure. The album’s eerie, watery quality is due in no small part to the work of a bass guitar tone drenched in springy reverb and muted blues.

The straightforward death metal material on Senescence is quite good, but the stranger Vile Rites gets, the better they get. Take, for instance, the recurring theremin-like synth waves, emerging from the inky blackness, threatening to overwhelm, before disappearing once again (“Only Silence Follows,” “Transcendent Putrefaction”). Or the lengthy middle section of “Transcendent Putrefaction” that suspends both momentum and harmony and just when it seems you’ve lost your way in the song, Johnson drops in on a swinging, shuffle groove that would be wildly out of place in lesser hands. Even the interlude, ever the albatross of albums, knows just how long to last with its gentle picked guitar and synths swirling amidst a summer storm (“Ephemeral Reverie of Eroded Dreams”). The band—along with that elegant cover, mysterious and melancholy—use atmosphere and smart, inventive riffcraft to drag the listener down, and the end result is impressive.

The more I listened to Senescence, the harder it was to find faults in its design. Longform closer “Banished To Solitude (Adrift On The Infinite Waves)” has plenty of high moments, from a nasty decelerator of a riff in it’s opening, to a menacing build-up just before the final chorus, and dueling bass and guitar solos to round out the album. I could nitpick and say that the outro drags on just a bit too long, and that the buildup, absolutely loaded with potential energy, meets its release just a few bars too early, but I’m really splitting hairs here. The one point I will level at the band is that I can’t help but feel that they’re hovering right on the precipice of a stellar album, but haven’t quite found it. This is a nebulous criticism that’s hard to quantify, but while everything is executed near-perfectly in these six tracks, very little left me awestruck, and I think Vile Rites has the tools to do just that.

Vile Rites have produced a debut album that comes so close to swatting the counter it hurts. Loaded with mind-bending stanky riffs, soaring solos, and glistening proggy diversions, Senescence is a must-listen for all fans of the OSDM revival movement. I think Vile Rites will find their path forward in the riches of “Banished To Solitude…” and a continued incursion into stranger, wilder sound worlds. Keep your eyes fixated on the movements of these Santa Rosa boys, a leviathan may be lurking in their future.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Carbonized Records
Websites: vilerites.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/VileRites
Releases Worldwide: August 16th, 2024

#2024 #35 #AmericanMetal #Aug24 #BetweenTheBuriedAndMe #BlackenedDeathMetal #CarbonizedRecords #Death #DeathMetal #FacelessBurial #Gorguts #MorbidAngel #ProgressiveDeathMetal #PsychedelicMetal #Review #Reviews #Senescence #VileRites

Funeral Leech – The Illusion of Time Review

By Cherd

If I had a dollar for every time I blindly picked some doom-tinged death metal from the Promo Wheel of Suffering and walked away with almost straight Incantation worship, I’d have…(math sounds)…OK, I’d only have enough for a donut and coffee from the Speedway up the street, but that’s a lot when you rarely review death metal. With the arrival of The Illusion of Time1 by New York’s Funeral Leech, I now have enough to play a scratch-off ticket while I drink my coffee. I’m not complaining. Incantation are my personal favorite OSDM outfit, and it’s probably no coincidence that I can detect whiffs of their brackish death metal rising from promos I know nothing else about. The question now is whether or not Funeral Leech’s grimy death doom is any good. And since time is an illusion, you should have plenty of it to spend parsing out this question with me.

The Illusion of Time, the band’s sophomore album, nails the pungent atmosphere one would expect of cavern-core. The production approaches Onward to Golgotha levels of grime, yet somehow maintains a shockingly high DR. The tremolo death riffs roil and slide, and drummer/vocalist Lucas Anderson’s dry bellows hew far closer to Craig Pillard than John McEntee. So, are Incatationanigans all these guys have up their sleeves? Not quite. Things tend slower and doomier in general. The band themselves cite another Jersey group, Evoken, as an influence. I can hear it, especially on closer “The Tower,” though Funeral Leech don’t sustain these funeral doom levels of crawl throughout. They do add some lugubrious touches of storm sounds, tolling bells and synths here and there without overusing them, which is appreciated. At their fastest, which is just the upper range of mid-paced, Funeral Leech slot in nicely next to death metal contemporaries Fossilization.

I’ll get my main criticism out of the way before I tell you why The Illusion of Time is a good record. When it comes to being safe and comfy in a well-worn sound, Funeral Leech are a bathrobe and slippers. They might have a pentagram embroidered on them, but they’re still fuzzy and soft and absorbent. Fashionable this is not, but I’m happy to wrap myself in the scuzzy riffs of songs like “Ceaseless Wheel of Becoming” and “Penance” when I want to let my mind idle. The promo materials seemed to think this was more of a melting pot of sounds than it actually is, citing several funeral and traditional doom bands that I just don’t hear.2 What I do hear is a VERY New Jersey-centric, American death doom sound, which is far from a bad thing.3

The ideal experience with cavern-core leaves a listener needing to de-grime afterwards with Gojo or Lava or some other brand of pumice soap usually reserved for car mechanics or farmers. Funeral Leech are just such a band, and you’ll have to exfoliate until you draw blood to ever really feel clean again after spinning The Illusion of Time. The atmosphere is unrelentingly thick and miasmic, with crunchy down-tuned tremolo riffs, knuckle-dragging marches and mournful guitar moans. These riffs are consistently solid and occasionally memorable, with the best examples occurring in the first half of opener “…And the Sky Wept” and throughout “Penance,” which was, incidentally, the song that made me remark to my colleagues “Well THAT was a straight up Incantation song.” Perhaps the best part of the band’s sound is Anderson’s enviable low rumbling death roar, which again, is like Craig Pillard but without all the shitheadedness.4 From a songwriting standpoint, most of the five tracks follow a pattern of mid-paced first half and slowed down back half, with some returning to the mid-paced pummeling near the end. It can be a bit repetitive, and the songs sometimes bog down somewhere in the middle of the slow parts, but they ultimately play their style well.

There’s no shortage of relatively new death metal bands looking to early-nineties Jersey for inspiration, but Funeral Leech pull off the pastiche without sounding too tired thanks to solid riff craft and a suffocating atmosphere. If you’re looking for something fresh and exhilarating, look elsewhere, but if you’re after a grimy good time, have yourself a good wallow in The Illusion of Time.

Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 10 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Carbonized Records
Websites: funeralleech.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/funeralleech
Releases Worldwide: April 5th, 2024

#2024 #30 #AmericanMetal #Apr24 #CarbonizedRecords #DeathMetal #DoomMetal #Evoken #FuneralLeech #Incantation #Review #Reviews

Blazar – Fatal Cosmic Wound Review

By Thus Spoke

People call funeral doom boring, and I get it. It’s very slow, often very long, not particularly technical, and contains few riffs per minute. Its compositions are not ordinarily gym-friendly, or headbangable. But good funeral doom is good. Crushing, transportive, and at times incredibly beautiful, as the low, slow and leaden is partnered with rising, floaty, ethereal melodies. Think Shape of Despair, Clouds, Esoteric. All this to say, that the best funeral doom is that which balances its punishing heaviness and crawling tempos with clean, graceful melodiousness in order to produce something truly immense. Blazar, Spanish funeral doom/sludge gang have a different philosophy. Cleaving closer to the ‘death’ in death-doom, and eschewing beauty and grace for menace and eerie synth-work, their debut LP Fatal Cosmic Wound aims for massiveness through pure grime. But will it end up vindicating the funeral doom naysayers?

About a month ago, Spectral Voice landed in my hands, and it was a reminder of the terrible, immersive oppressiveness that death doom and its variants can achieve. The proximity of this experience makes for a damning comparison when it comes to Blazar. Fatal Cosmic Wound maintains a gritty production, and an old-school style tone to the guitars, plus some creepy synths, reinforce the overall sludgy, ugly vibes. But despite its greater emphasis on being “mean,” in the surface-level sense, the album rarely comes across as truly heavy. Rather, the plodding tempos and barely-varying riffs melt together with those subtle background synths into anodyne stomping about as deep and dark as a puddle. There are times when Blazar approach that funereal transcendence of elephantine weight (see parts of “Beyond the Event Horizon,” and “Crystalised Oblivion”), but it doesn’t last.

One of the most promising aspects of Fatal Cosmic Wound is its propensity for spookiness. The album begins, ends, and is bisected by short synth instrumentals, and whilst they arguably don’t bring much to the whole, they are pretty unnerving. In fact, opener “Aether” instantly transported me back in time many years to a particular mystery adventure flash game I was once obsessed with,1 with warped, resonant notes and weird popping synth sounds. When Blazar weave these cleaner electronic elements into their grimy doom, it makes for some powerful and powerfully intriguing moments—such as the weird warbling of synth that bubbles up before combining with a strong, mournful refrain on “Crystallised Oblivion,” the pitch-shifting chords that accent the guitar before fading away for stripped-back plucking on the title track, and the unsettling presence of ebbing modular chords as “Forgotten” reaches its denouement. During these moments, and even during the interludes, I feel some of the feelings that the album was intended to invoke—fear, nausea, excitement And even though the synths could have been integrated better into the rest of the music, rather than mostly split between the instrumentals, there is promise and depth here.

The synths and these relatively immersive passages, however, make up but a fraction of Fatal Cosmic Wound’s total length. Though the album itself is a very reasonable—especially for doom—47 minutes long, it drags. This is so particularly in the first half, as, after “Aether” fades away, “Fatal Cosmic Wound” and ” Beyond the Event Horizon” play back-to-back, and they are unfortunately the longest and least dynamic of the four tracks proper. Great doom achieves magnificence through deceptive simplicity, layering and building anticipation to stunning apexes. But there is nothing deceptive about the simplicity here. Songs don’t build so much as maintain a level of density that remains monotone bar a few key changes or minor variations on the same riff pattern, and chord. It’s not jarring so much as frustrating, because while some excellent riff craft does arise from time to time, and while it’s very heavy, when sewn together, the tapestry is too bland to be compelling or oppressive.

If you’re looking to fill three-quarters of an hour with some nasty, downbeat noise, then Fatal Cosmic Wound might be for you, if you like it slow. Doom aficionados could go either way here, and love its grit enough not to be bothered by its uniformity, or be put off by its resolute unchangingness, and yearn for the depth it lacks. I have to say, I’m in the latter camp. For a genre that can reach truly abyssal profundities and cosmic heights, the album remains staunchly at sea level, despite its celestial title. Blazar still have much to prove.

Rating: Disappointing
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Carbonized Records
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: March 1st, 2024

#20 #2024 #Blazar #CarbonizedRecords #DoomMetal #FatalCosmicWound #FuneralDoom #Mar24 #Review #Reviews #SludgeMetal #SpanishMetal

Street Tombs - Diseased Existence

https://youtu.be/dNjlGlckiNI

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Negative Prayer - Hell

https://youtu.be/RN0HF1w1dj0

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Negative Prayer - Morbid

https://youtu.be/CWGnVTQY9sk

#music #metal #punk #dbeat #crust #negativeprayer #carbonizedrecords

Street Tombs - Rising Torment

https://youtu.be/IZOsJjMmJRc

#music #metal #deathmetal #streettombs #carbonizedrecords