Always feels kinda nice and also odd getting a CD review copy of something that screams ‘old school’ so loudly it probably spins at 33rpm. That and it sounds so tangible and so thick with tar that you could resurface the average road with it. Not the clean digital sound of the future that I was promised as a youth, then, thank the elder gods! Nice, weird black cover art too.
So “Ritual Chamber is the most recent project of the prolific Dario J. Derna (aka Numinas) who is most well-known for his work with Krohm and Infester among the many other entries on his résumé (Vetus Obscurum, Drawn and Quartered, Evoken, and Funebrarum among others)…. ” That’s what the resume says, but the (rotten, dark, festering) meat of this little gem is firmly in that dark and twisted place where black metal meets death metal, Teitanblood layered with a thick dredged sound that on occasion recalls a less whirling Impetuous Ritual and slower passages haunted by the ghost of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost. This is great, rumbling downtuned music; deep growling vocals snarling behind dense and relentless riffs. Discordant lead notes echo like wailing in some subterranean labyrinth, the spluttering hollow sounds of the odd vocal effect flickering through. Bestial and raw this demo may be bit it also has a deep river of dark, dank atmosphere. It reeks of deeptime, of ages too long to measure sanely and the sound of things we were not meant to know. Five tracks, around thirty perfectly timed minutes of blackness from opener ‘The Dawning Of A New Inversion ‘ through ‘Glorious Curse Of Almighty Death’, ‘A Thermonuclear Fate’ and ‘Black Rites Of Conjuration’ to ‘Nomad Daimons’. This is dense, thick stuff and utterly mesmerising in its roiling filthy waves. It is relentless and fits together more as a concentrated listen than one for picking tracks out of ship be prepared for a half hour horror trip.
Demo maybe, but for a one man vision this is exemplary. Nasty, dark, twisted beauty that should appeal to anyone with a love of the eldritch and the black.
(8/10 Gizmo)
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