It’s still surprising to me that this is Grave Miasma’s debut full length album, seeing as I (like many others) was completely imbued with the sickness of their two EPs which preceded this. Originally forming under the name Goat Molestör (under which they released another slew of EPs), these guys have it down pat when it comes to bringing the occult unwholesomeness to your door in heaped spade fulls. Simply put, expectation was pretty damn high for this album, and having given my eardrums a good long marinade of its sounds, I can say they’ve actually exceeded their own impeccably high standards.
‘Odori Sepulcrorum’ pulses and heaves with a true feeling of evil and decay, spewing forth blasts of malevolence akin to the warm, musty gust of opening an ancient doorway into a world unspoken of for time immemorial. Staying loyal to the roots of Goatlord, early Immolation, Incantation et al, they unravel the very fabric of death metal, revealing its very basest roots of furnace blasted evil, grim occultism and terminal disease. Packed in a thick feverish atmosphere, the album is kicked off with ‘Death’s Meditative Trance’. It rumbles and ambles at a slow pace at first, the cavernous vocals laden with reverb, guitars chiming and echoing around the thick bass and drums all sounding as though they’re being vomiting forth by some horrific, unimaginable Lovecraftian evil that dwells in the darkest corners of the abyss.
‘Ovation to a Thousand Lost Reveries’ opens with some guitar squeals and the same foreboding evil which encapsulates this whole release, tangled in a web of maniacal drums and twisted guitar work – you can almost feel the coffin lids lifting and the crypts slowly emptying of undead legions. In the album’s brilliant title track, there is a riff a couple of minutes in where it just feels like a soundtrack to some sort of ancient ritual; it really mindblowing what they’ve managed to create here. But it’s hard to pick this apart by highlighting certain tracks and dissecting it that way, as this is very much an album to be taken in as a whole. The entire album reeks of the impure, tainted with curses uttered in lost languages, insanity and pure wickedness of an antediluvian past never dared to be remembered, let alone recorded in written history. Grave Miasma has always been good, but I never quite thought they’d reach these peaks which are regularly unattainable for most.
Are you a fan of death metal? If you are, then you really can’t miss this out. I had a niggling thought at the back of my mind that when it came to a full length release for Grave Miasma, that their magic might not be quite as potent. But, I was wrong – SO wrong. I’d go as far as saying that this is one of the best death metal albums released in the past 10 years or so; it really is that good. Don’t trust my words? Listen for yourself and get sucked into a fatal tar pit of death metal badassery. Heartily recommended!
(9.5/10 Lars Christiansen)
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