The ritual complete, the circle sealed, Richard Benton steps back from his grand working, the fifty most repellent shades conjured within the last year now bound harmlessly to ink and paper. But wait! A shifting of movement in the periphery catches his eye, as fresh horrors pull themselves from the shadows and chitter seductively.

Through The Cracks Of Death – December 2022 – Death Metal Albums Round-Up:

If there was an election to choose the true successors to Portal, my vote would be cast for Cryptae. Rather than trying to copy the sound of the Australian masters, Capsule (Sentient Ruin) follows in their tentacle-steps by taking the elements of death metal and reassembling them into something both entirely familiar and completely different. Somehow blending industrial and pop elements in a way that sounds nothing at all like you’re imaging either of them to, Capsule subverts every expectation but the one about caving your head in. If there really is anything new to be done with death metal in the next few years, Cryptae are almost certainly the ones going to be doing it.

 

With two albums in eighteen years, Beyond Mortal Dreams don’t require a huge effort to catch up with, but Abomination Of The Flames (Lavadome) makes me wish they’d left more of a legacy. Blending early Nile with a cavernous atmosphere, Mithras-style melodic leads and some trippy synth and vocoder work might seem a bit strained on paper, but is delivered here with such confidence and power that it’s hard to believe they’ve been quiet since 2008. A muted production mutes some of the impact at first, but turn it up loud and the depth is overwhelming.

On Zoetrope (Invictus), Qrixkuor continue their journey from Portal copyists to an apocalyptic collision of death metal and neoclassical with a single, twenty-four minute track. Fuck, I almost want to call it a “movement”, so complex and carefully structured it is. If the septicflesh or Fleshgod Apocalypse approach to symphonic death metal makes it Death side too accessible for you, Zoetrope provides a much more horrific, harder-listening alternative.

 

Though not strictly eligible for the End of Year list due to being a compilation of earlier material, Parturition of Adulteration (Everlasting Spew) shows that Occulsed had their transgressive deconstruction of Incantation ready from the beginning. The sound, as you would expect, is raw and lacks clarity, but the songs are practically hypnotic in their violence, further confirming Occulsed as an essential band for those looking to see classic American death metal brought forward.

Harbinger (Avantgarde), the second full-length from Italian/American Inverted Matter, opens with a raging, thrashy riff that may lead you to expect a straight-forward kicking – just over a minute later, those expectations have been buried under a mountain of angular riffing and spacey, Voivod-ian dynamics. Inverted Matter join Defacement and Swelling Repulsion in the ranks of bands who want to play death metal their own way, blending unfamiliar references and strange atmospheres into music that’s lost none of its savagery.

 

RICHARD BENTON