Clearly I’ve been sleeping on ROTDH as despite three albums in six years this is my introduction to this member of The Nox Entity collective. A quick scan of the members indicates pretty much what I would very respectfully call ‘veterans’ of a variety of scenes so perhaps the work ethic should be expected. I’m guessing doom foundations before I hit the play and…

‘The Restless Doomed’ opens with a slow, dark and eerie rise of sounds; insect like scampering, buzzing and a steady increase in the background noise. Deep notes drip into the buzzing swarm and then the monolithic doom/death/sludge riff collapses onto you. As the vocals come in, harsh and menacing, the black metal taint creeps in. Teitanblood playing Amenra? Well a cheap journalistic comments but the off kilter melody and the crushing blackened doom riff pretty much fits it. It’s a track with a real undertow, pulling on you relentlessly. The next track ‘Wij Hoeren Van Lucifer’ absolutely steamrolls that Teitanblood sound initially, thumping great drumming and subterranean riff obliterating you before it rises into some absolutely superb blackened death. It’s like being carpet bombed; nowhere to hide until that slower section slips in seamlessly. The production gives it that huge, echoing chamber sound where the vocals and the riffs reverberate loudly enough to crack bones.

‘Lus Cruentationis’ sticks with this deeply blackened death metal; thundering, rumbling passages of a relentless mid-paced tempo, slower echoing doomy sludge tinged passages. It needs to be listened to, I found. This isn’t background music. This demands to have your full attention and if you give it, you will see how beautifully balanced and crafted this work is. The trio are totally in control here, no need to display pointless techno-flash aspects when the arrangement is so effortless and the sound remains so primal and chthonic.

And into the beautifully titled ‘Mayhem And The Goat’. It ups the pace, runs of pure nasty black metal collide with the doom/death and a gleeful, thrashy attitude to match.

‘De Gnijdige’ is a blast of fast, hard death metal descending into a bit of a chug if I’m honest, but closer ‘Stigma Diabolicum’ once more has that winding up the malevolence to the riff, circling slowly around the listener. Dark, monomaniacal and brutal it’s a perfect ending.

Rituals Of The dead Hand have with their third album not only shown what adept musicians they are, but far better how they have a firm, diabolical grip on the dismal, the dark and the subterranean sound where doom and death and black metal swirl with the unnamed things which drip from cavernous ceilings far below. It’s been a long time since such a claustrophobic descent into the pit has been offered to me and it was well worth the trip.

(8/10 Gizmo)

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https://immortalfrostproductions1.bandcamp.com/album/the-wretched-and-the-vile