I bought Cadaverous Condition’s 2001 album “The Lesser Travelled Seas” after they impressed me live. It’s a good album with its grainy death metal and folksy moments, so it got another deserved listen before I got going with this one. The band has in fact been going since 1990, and “Never Arrive, Never Return”, 23 years on from the one I know, this is their 7th album release.
This is a band whose line-up hasn’t changed for years and it shows. Cadaverous Condition’s music is tight. What I noticed about the 2024 version is that their music is more produced, not unsurprisingly given the passage of years and upgrade in technology, and more intense. “They Came from the Hills” opens the album and is a forward-facing piece of death metal with distinctly blackened edges. It rocks and it rolls very nicely in its blackly death way. “The Plow” draws attention with its deep bass line before launching into the chugging death style with which I was familiar. It’s designed for heads to rock forwards and backwards. “The Eternal Burial” has more of a rock n roll feel to it, driving forward at rapid pace and drawing us in with a hooky guitar line and Wolfgang Weiss’s guttural vocal leadership. Weiss then croaks out the death ballad beginning of “All the Wrong Turns” before the drummer pumps things up and leads us into a harsh and very dark instrumental march. And here’s where Cadaverous Condition are different: it just stops and ends in a quiet and melancholic mood.
“Blizzard of Lies” then starts with dark and ominous intent. The riff line and drum signal another march as the song treads its deathly path, stepping up in tempo and intensity as it progresses uncompromisingly. Listening to Cadaverous Condition can be like listening to an old school rock band but in a death metal style. The steady “From the Other Side” is fluid as a song, as this band’s songs are, while being full of ferocious sadness. “Hidden Things” has energy and is typically chunky but offers nothing new. The bombastically-titled “The Darkness is in my Bloodstream” notches things up again. It is a power-packed ball of rumbling death metal darkness and provides a level of excitement which had been threatening to disappear. Just as I had written off “A Thousand Midnights in the Silent War” as being a pure death metal song, the band break it up and end on a different, still deathly note. This is followed by the sludgy and atmospheric “To Be”, that is until an acoustic section which leads into an expansive and moody passage, capped off by one final bout of trademark sludgy death metal.
Gone for the most part are the folksy elements but ever present here on “Never Arrive, Never Return” are the energy and driving intensity which makes Cadaverous Condition’s work so powerful. With tempo and stylistic directional changes and little surprises, the band keep us interested as well as providing occasional excitement and burying us in an ever-deepening pit.
(7.5/10 Andrew Doherty)
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