Assumption

Assumption

Paradox Of The Arrow

20 Buck Spin

Italy’s Assumption return with Paradox of the Arrow, a new descent into the strange temporal architecture of death doom. Since their earliest recordings the band have treated the genre less as a monolith set in stone than a space in which mass, duration and atmosphere can be manipulated. On Paradox of the Arrow that process advances further, stretching the apparent distance between one moment and the next time itself dissipates into an altered abstraction. Assumption’s immense low-end foundations remain, but the band’s heaviness is rarely a matter of density alone. Riffs unfurl geologically, like the convergent boundary to a subduction zone, before abruptly accelerating into passages of violent death metal, only to collapse again into long intervals of suspension, dissonant guitar resonance and spectral ambience. Guttural vocals emerge from deep within while drums alternately measure out enormous spaces and rupture them without warning. Melody appears in oblique fragments rather than conventional resolution, and psychedelic details flicker at the margins, where quiet stillness can feel as consequential as impact and the vibrations of beauty and dread dissolve into an amorphous shimmering light. Taking its name from Zeno’s ancient paradox of motion: the proposition that an arrow in flight, observed at any single instant, is motionless, Paradox of the Arrow finds an apt philosophical analogue for Assumption’s music. These six tracks from the depths draw the listener through successive states of movement and inertia, collapsing the notion of linear time. Across its prolonged passages and sudden eruptions, the album continually distorts the...

Assumption

Hadean Tides

Sentient Ruin Laboratories

***Italian death-doom titans Assumption return with "Hadean Tides", their colossal new full-length album and first new work of new material in four long long years. "Hadean Tides" sees the Italian quartet take their dismal experimental slow moving death metal formula into a realm of absolutely soul-disintegrating majesty, unfolding nearly an hour of abysmal downtuned crawling carnage immersed in contemplative dirges and mesmerizing ambience. Few underground extreme metal bands these days are capable of evoking such grandiose visions of aphotic dimensions and of shifted states of consciousness as Assumption can conjure through the hallucinatory immensity of their transformative death-doom. Yet, "Hadean Tides" sees the Italian band seemingly dwell on a plain of creative clairvoyance unto its own, once again shattering boundaries and exalting an endless stream of influences and boundless sonic exploration to reaffirm themselves as absolute prophets of this visionary death metal transcendence where cavernous gargantuan riffs and supernatural ambient soundscaping interweave each other and are trapped within an inextricable time dilation to form a monstrous aural hallucination adrift unto the abyss. The massive album displays an unseen plethora of chromatics and manifestations of self, adding keys, strings, choral chants and flutes to the absolute crush-depth to mutate effortlessly between the dismal bleakness of bands like Evoken or Esoteric, the comatose encrusted cavernous rot of death-doom legends like Winter or Disembowelment, and the enigmatic ambience abstractions of ethereal experimental bands like Dead Can Dance and Trial of the Bow. The band's masterful melding of styles and transformative approach to the...