🖤 ROUND I - Phase 1 - match 47/50

Which one is the best doom metal album?

🤘 dISEMBOWELMENT, Transcendence into the Peripheral, (1993)
or
🤘 Sunn O))) & Boris, Altar, (2006)

➡️See pinned post on profile for the tournament rules

 Please 𝗕𝗢𝗢𝗦𝗧 Transcendence into the Peripheral

🎧 YOU ARE STRONGLY ENCOURAGED TO GIVES EACH ALBUM A FRESH LISTEN BEFORE VOTING

#KingusMusicTournaments #MusicTournament #Doom #DoomMetal #KMTPoll #Music #dISEMBOWELMENT #SunnO #Boris

An Tóramh – Echoes of Eternal Night Review

By Steel Druhm

Coming off the titanic ass-whipping I received from atmo-doom upstarts Structure, I stumbled concussed and confuzzled right into a funeral doom bushwhacking by the unheralded Minneapolis-based two-man project, An Tóramh.1 Formed by members of Chalice of Suffering and Goatwitch, An Tóramh play brain-pulping funerary muzak draped in existential dread and gutwrenching despair, as all things should be. Echoes of Eternal Night borrows essential talismans and reliquaries from the graves of Loss, Evoken, and Ataraxie to create an emotionally deadening experience that slowly emulsifies your skeletal structure into Laffy Taffy™. This is weighty, unrelenting stuff, with massive, earth-moving riffs offset by tragically forlorn trilling and all of it vomited upon by gurgling death vocals from the sub-sub-basement of the monstorium. It’s a recipe for a deeply immersive death reverie or a total snooze-fest, depending on the relative skill of those involved. Which side of sleepytime gorilla nap bait will Echoes fall on? Let’s kick the casket tires.

After a mood-setting but overlong intro, the prime beef gets slapped down on the meat table hard with the monolithic title track. This is 7-plus-minutes of fucking HUGE funeral doom with all boxes checked and all lights blinking red like the Chernobyl control room on April 26, 1986. It’s massively heavy, menacing, and flows like molasses mixed with wet concrete. Hideous doom riffs entwine with sadboi harmonies as cymbals crash and John Suffering wretches his internal organs out. It’s harrowing and horrible, but oddly beautiful. “Desolation” runs over nine minutes, opening with an air of hope and positivity before settling into a melancholic doom plod past the graves of empires forlorn. The Candlemassive bittersweet guitar harmonies pair well with the subterranean death croaks, and just when things seem to be drifting back toward hopefulness, the rug gets pulled and you tumble back into eternal darkness.

“Shadows of Despair” is bleak and weepy, but slowly mixes in light, airy synths and strings that remind me of the Friday Night Lights soundtrack by Explosions in the Sky. It creates a strange dichotomy of moods, but it works really well. “Sea of Sorrow” is classic sadboi, melancholic funeral doom, and it blends the sour with the sweet in just the right measures to drag you under the waves. However, some issues hold Echoes of Eternal Night back from a greater triumph. As great as the title track is, no other song captures that same magical misery. “Embrace the Shadows” is quite good, and I love the heavy sighing of the riffs and how the understated symphonic elements add a touch of grandeur and scope to the music, but it doesn’t quite ascend to the same level of masterful doom. Closer “Withering in Sorrow” is an effective piece, but the production here is way worse than on the rest of the album, with the vocals almost totally buried in a much more raw sound, and it reeks of basement demo recording hijinks. Still, the last few minutes bring a deadly Celtic Frost / Triptykon element to the riffs that turns the brain into bug jelly. At just under 50 minutes, Echoes is a very tolerable length, and though every track could be trimmed, this is funeral doom, and the dour duo make good use of the elongated run times.

Anthony Copertino Jr. (Goatwitch) handles everything except vocals and does a great job across the board. His guitar work sticks closely to the original Book ov Funeral Doom, with two-ton riffs coming down hard and weepy melodic trills resounding near and far. Importantly, he knows when to drone and when to shift to a new riff, which aids the ebb and flow of the lengthy compositions. His keyboard/synth work functions as a rounding agent to smooth down the extreme edges, and he never allows them to interfere with the guitars or vocals. Drum-wise, he delivers a satisfyingly heavy, resonant thudding with dramatic cymbal work throughout.2 Meanwhile, John Suffering offers an everflowing stream of mega-deep, monstrous death roars that call to mind the immortal diSEMBOWELMENT. He doesn’t change things up much, but he’s effectively inhuman and anchors the miserable sound palette.

Echoes of Eternal Night is a very successful debut with moments of top-tier funeral doom, and no track turns into a grave collapse. The twosome behind An Tóramh know how to make this oh-so-niche genre compelling and unexpectedly listenable. If you need more unhappiness in your life, this is an album you can wallow in like a doom hog in the tears of the crestfallen. Wrestle that sadpig, poser!

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Black Lion
Websites: antoramhblacklion.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/antoramh
Releases Worldwide: May 9th, 2025

#2025 #35 #AmericanMetal #AnTóramh #Ataraxia #BlackLionRecords #CelticFrost #ChaliceOfSuffering #diSEMBOWELMENT #DoomMetal #EchoesOfEternalNight #Evoken #FuneralDoomMetal #Loss #May25 #Review #Reviews #Triptykon

The big small d. DOOM CLASSIC "Transcendence Into The Peripheral"

#diSEMBOWELMENT
#doommetal #metal #classic #CD #NowPlaying

Ritual Ascension – Profanation of the Adamic Covenant Review

By Dear Hollow

Profanation of the Adamic Covenant represents catacombs dripping with putridity and filth, the blasphemy called against the heavens from far below ground. It’s an upheaval from beneath our feet, the crawling and coagulant rot that spreads from abyss to abyss. The filth and blood clots our eyes, hearts, and minds, driving us deeper and deeper into the madness until our lungs are filled with mud. Ritual Ascension is transcendence and enlightenment achieved through the reveling and swallowing of the grime-soaked entrails through a vicious and ancient ritual, the lumbering deity whose mammoth footfalls and cloud of plague require payment in full. It’s a ritual to the god of the mud and disease, and a fist slammed into the underside of heaven.

Death/doom has many heads, but the one Ritual Ascension rears may be the ugliest. The Denver collective, alongside sharing all three members with Aberration, is comprised of members of Suffering Hour, Void Rot, Feral Light, and Annihilation Cult, promising a psychedelic affair inspired just as much by the classic death/doom acts of yore as the more experimental devastators. You’ll certainly find homages to Incantation, diSEMBOWELMENT, and Winter in its ten-ton doom hammers, but atop it is an opaque and occult breed of dissonant insanity reminiscent of Portal and a palpable filth only touched by the likes of Stenched or Rotpit, only kept in the realm of humanity by a palpable groove that reminds me of Ataraxie. Ritual Ascension offers the depths in ways few can, a collective far greater than the sum of its parts.

Crawling, slimy chaos is one hell of a first impression. Overload of down-tuned and filthy tremolo guide mammoth processions, whose dissonant constructions and atonal dirges provide a hypnotic otherworldliness. As displayed lumbering out of the gates, its attack is slimy, slow, and devastating, ultimately a feeling or a place rather than a collection of highlights – as any good doom album ought to be. From the subtle and simple chord progressions that dominate more minimalist pieces (“Womb Exegesis”) to the groovy and monolithic chugs that grace the climaxes of lengthy runtimes (“Pillars of Antecedence,” “Cursed Adamic Tongues”), interspersed by passages of blastbeats ranging from blazing to contemplative. DH’s vocals are a crucial element to the album’s subterranean and blasphemous atmosphere, ranging from the commanding chthonic bellows you expect from this breed of devastation to the tortured howls and groans more indicative of black metal.

If the first half of Profanation is subtle and crawling, then the second exists as utterly filthy slow-motion violence. I was initially disappointed that the Portal-isms were not as handily felt among the tracks of the first half, only gleaming in sporadic moments and within traditionally ominous diminished chord progressions. However, crossing into the second half with the scalding “Consummation Rites” and “Kolob (At the Throne of Elohim),” caustic slow-motion Ulcerate leads collide with the filthiest riffs Impetuous Ritual could muster, with DH’s most charismatic performances of the album. Unhinged and cutthroat are not words typically associated with doom, but the layers of overwhelm and dissonance meet the criteria with a bloodthirstiness and underlying craving for brutality. Looking back, it would have been relatively easy to incorporate the dissonant intensity in the first couple of tracks, but their later full fruition after a crawling crescendo makes them feel even more painful and overwhelming.

Even though the dissonance was not as immediate as I anticipated and the necessity for the patience required for this kind of beast goes without saying for its atmosphere – rather than a collection of songs – Profanation of the Adamic Covenant is transcendent. Encapsulating that crawling dread and ritualistic weight, monolithic groove, and dissonant layers in a tidy forty-eight minutes and held together by the dedication to unholy filth, it offers bounties aplenty for those willing to wade through the offal and mire. Bolstered by impressive performances in unpredictable percussion, riffs both mammoth and caustic, and vocals tortured and menacing, Ritual Ascension offers one hell of a debut. Get swallowed by the filth.

Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Sentient Ruin Laboratories
Website: instagram.com/ritualascension
Releases Worldwide: February 28th, 2025

#2025 #40 #Aberration #AmericanMetal #AnnihilationCult #Ataraxie #AvantGardeMetal #DeathDoomMetal #diSEMBOWELMENT #DissonantDeathMetal #Feb25 #FeralLight #ImpetuousRitual #Incantation #OldSchoolDeathMetal #Portal #ProfanationOfTheAdamicCovenant #Review #Reviews #RitualAscension #Rotpit #SentientRuinLaboratories #Stenched #SufferingHour #Ulcerate #VoidRot #Winter

#Saturdoom: The band I liked the most during the first day of Oslo Deathfest, was the young, Norwegian funeral death/doom band, #Gloombound. With the synth/organ, they make me think of #Skepticism, and live they also gave me #diSEMBOWELMENT vibes. As a bonus, the guitarist wore a #Theregothon long sleeve. So, they hit all the right spots for me. I look forward to the album, that apparently will be released next year.
https://gloomboundband.bandcamp.com/album/astral-exhalation

#doomMetal #doom #funeralDoom #OsloDeathfest

Ataraxie – Le Déclin Review

By Dear Hollow

Once again, as reflected in the French act’s fifth full-length, Ataraxie channels an existential crisis. Le Déclin is not just a soundtrack of its inspiration source (Ahab, Tyranny) or a dark meditation on devastation (Evoken, Bell Witch), it’s something more profound. Throughout its miasmic movements and stark artwork, I am called back to Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman’s opus magnum, the 1957 film The Seventh Seal, a knight’s struggle through the days of Black Plague allegorized as a chess game between himself and Death. Likewise, Le Déclin continues its predecessor’s bleak and tormented commentary on the “manipulation and obfuscation of the Masses, the cult of selfishness, dehumanization towards a parasiting [sic] virtual life, [and] global warming insolubility.” Through the lens of modern global anxiety and medieval self-flagellation, Ataraxie revels in the human torment beneath it all.

Ataraxie, while not always unique in its viscous approach to punishing death/doom, has always been far more guitar-forward, forgoing the atmospheric bells and whistles of genre stalwarts. The first full-length Slow Transcending Agony expertly balanced the weight and tempo of funeral doom with the riffs and punishment of death metal in a unique breed that maintained a unique simmering energy. However, it wasn’t until the very well-received L’Etre et la Nausée and R​é​sign​é​s that this fusion was successfully streamlined into a more palatable expression that balances tradition with punishment. Featuring three guitarists,1 more sophisticated arrangements, and penchant for melancholy and desperation alike, the minimalist emphasis remains as punishing as ever. Although Le Déclin somewhat lacks the memorability of Ataraxie’s magnum opera, four lengthy compositions complete with earthshaking thunder and melodies like the tolling of death knells nonetheless collide to create one of the best doom albums of the year. It is Ataraxie, after all.

While the overwhelm of traditional funeral doom acts like Thergothon or Esoteric is certainly intact, that weight is powerfully balanced out by the death metal guitar influence of diSEMBOWELMENT or Winter. Slow growths across mammoth sixteen to twenty-two-minute runtimes give way to glorious eruptions of crushing heaviness and haunting melodies, punctuated by patient lulls. While the lack of ambiance can be seen as a detriment in the barren no man’s land of funeral doom, Ataraxie does a fantastic job of weaponizing dynamics and more traditional death metal motifs, such as blazing tremolo and blast beats (“Vomisseurs De Vide,” “Glory of Ignominy”), chunky climactic riffs, and pulsing undercurrents of energetic percussion (“Glory of Ignominy,” “The Collapse”). While adding to the muscularity of the already colossal album, bassist/vocalist Jonathan Théry’s charismatic and haunting shrieks, shouts, and roars add to the madness, keenly aligned with desperation and fury. Le Déclin is mixed nearly perfectly, Ataraxie’s weight and gloom felt through every movement, crushing down like the empty sky.

Most impressive about Ataraxie is its ability to balance sloth, melancholy, and aggression organically, without losing its conviction to starkness—and only with the bare bones of its triple-guitar attack. Because of this, the heavy-handed melo-drama of acts like Saturnus or Novembers Doom is absent in favor of desolation, reflected in elements like effective spoken word (“Vomisseurs de Vide”) and the dynamic motifs scattered throughout. The weaponized layered plucking or strumming may sound too hammy or heartfelt on paper, but when it sounds like tolling bells (“Le Déclin”) or progressions completely devoid of hope (“Vomisseurs de Vide,” “Glory of Ignominy”), the weight of every empty note feels just as devastating as the colossal funeral doom sprawls. Closer “The Collapse” streamlines the heft and barrenness seamlessly, its first act a steady crescendo that explodes into an outright death metal assault, its second act a blastbeat-infected climax into outright despair—Ataraxie’s nearly perfect dichotomy of beautiful and punishing.

The opening title track feels slightly less memorable than its successive three cuts, due to its more straightforward rhythm, but this criticism is trivial compared to the absolute sonic and existential devastation coursing through Ataraxie’s signature sound. Attention never sways across its hour-and-fifteen-minute length, with expertly composed lulls and crescendos guiding its movements. Cutting to the bone of funeral doom with the jagged blade of death metal, it dispenses with the frivolities and atmospherics for an album that is bleak and tormented to its very core – a chess game with Death in all its desperate victories and devastating losses. It’s the soundtrack of the crushed human spirit.

Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Ardua Music | Weird Truth Productions
Websites: ataraxie.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/ataraxiedoom
Releases Worldwide: October 25th, 2024

#2024 #40 #Ahab #ArduaMusic #Ataraxie #BellWitch #DeathMetal #DeathDoomMetal #diSEMBOWELMENT #DoomMetal #Esoteric #Evoken #FrenchMetal #FuneralDoomMetal #LeDéclin #Oct24 #Review #Reviews #Thergothon #Tyranny #WeirdTruthProductions #Winter