I picked up on this Czech band in 2015 with their excellent ‘Denouncing The Holy Throne’ album, a truly hideous atramentous release with disturbing qualities within its dense death metal foundations. This third album continues in a similar vein and if anything is even more hideous, more monstrous and more ominous. But, try as I might I just found myself floundering with ‘Darkness Of God’, struggling to absorb its intensity, its chaos and downright obliterating power, all of which should mean I should love this album, but I didn’t. Their blend of dense Immolation grotesquery with Hate Eternal tech terror ticked plenty of boxes on my death metal checklist but for some reason it didn’t click, which isn’t to say that the album is poor, far from it. We all have albums by bands we like that just can’t get into and this is one of them for me.
Opener, with its epic title I might add, ‘Violent Gospels (Ordination Of The Holy Trinity)’ is grisly, menacing and abominable, just what this style of death metal requires, its brutality and crepuscular aura is suffocating for sure, alongside its eclipsing velocities as their tendency to inject tendrils of chaos never goes unnoticed and it is probably this aspect I found the most difficult, but don’t get me wrong, it definitely works, adding huge intensity and that disturbing quality, I have already mentioned, Heaving Earth have in their song writing. Likewise, with the longer ‘Crossing The Great Divide (Prayer To A Crumbling Shrine)’ with an even more epic title which has Nile like hints and even a touch of progressivity within its battering framework.
At times we are submerged in a yawning chasm of oblivion typified by tunes like the atmospheric ‘Apologetics (Of Failure And Fall)’ where the blasted speed amplifies the power substantially and also ‘Forever Deceiving Dismal Gods’ a shorter far more detonating tune with an inhuman relentlessness. The bands technical elements have Hate Eternal like embellishments that you hear through the guitar work and its inflections as I also felt the band has drifted nicely into a latter era Death style too as on ‘Cardinal Sin’, with the shortest title on the album. The chaos is well controlled, precisely implanted for maximum effect as Cynic fans might get a kick out of this tune too.
At seven minutes plus ‘The Lord’s Lamentations’ is soaked in dread, atmospheric terror seeping into the pores of the tunes massacring assault and links nicely into ‘Earthly Kingdom Of God In Ruins’ by returning to the explosive chaotic speed and unnerving opacity that utterly encapsulates. Closing the album is ‘Woeful Redemption’, a grisly labyrinthine knot of corruption, shackling you within its shuddering horror, imprisoning and torturing you for eternity and exemplifies perfectly what makes this Czech band so gruesomely effective, hence the score I’ve afforded it.
(8.5/10 Martin Harris)
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