Finnish death act God Disease are gruesomely heavy, their brand of death metal is laced with doom corruption as each sprawling behemoth track has suffocating and dense oppressiveness. Added to that you get inhuman vocals, a pulverising drum display that isn’t fast but every beat feels like a sledgehammer blow as the release opens with “Descending Into Abyss”. The brief feedback leads into a sludge like bass tsunami and doom riddled riff, which is impenetrably heavy set against a funereal pace that slithers with gutter like grotesquery. “At the Pillars Of Kadatheron” follows and continues with an eerie guitar melody with a desolate aura, as cymbal taps lead into the drum fill which is accompanied by a sluggish bass riff. The riff break cracks the song apart with an ominous brooding ethos, as the pace retains the slow viscous writhing.

“King Of Maggot Crawling Flesh” sees a pick up in the tempo that leads the song down a glutinous melancholic drawl interspersed with periodic speed insurgency. The vocals are incredibly low in pitch, borderline gurgled as the tone has a beast like quality. A resonating assault starts “Cathedral Gates”, created by the oozing bass work that saturates the songs bleak riffing structure. And just when you think it can’t get any heavier the slow double kick pours a viscid density onto the whole creepy assault. Even the instrumental bridging track “Death… Is Just The Beginning” is engorged with a sense of skulking malfeasance that leads into “Blessed Darkness” where the speed decreases to that slithering oppressive nihilism that this band does with such punishing effectiveness.

Closing this brute of an album is the colossal title track, beginning with an eerie and haunting guitar melody underpinned by subtle bass, the cymbal taps are portentously placed as the song gradually unfurls into a titanic sonic gargoyle. The stagnant speed creates a stricken and bereft quality as the song’s momentum is like an unstoppable lava wall. The song morphs into a section which feels lighter due to the bass being reined in before it returns to the languorous toxicity continuing the songs elegiac qualities towards the fade out.

Those of you favouring the doom death side of death metal will wallow in this albums obliterating claustrophobia, it encases the listener with asphyxiating noxiousness.

(8/10 Martin Harris)

https://www.facebook.com/goddisease

https://goddiseasofficial.bandcamp.com/album/drifting-towards-inevitable-death