***Members of Void Rot, Suffering Hour, and Aberration come together in Ritual Ascension, a horrendous sonic desecration decomposing death metal into a subsonic hallucinatory miasma, and deforming into a hideous disfigurement of its former self. Devoured in dissonance and shrouded in catacombal atmospheres, the band’s horrendous debut full-length monstrosity "Profanation of the Adamic Covenant" takes the masterful death-doom horror of early Temple Nightside and of Grave Upheaval, and transfigures it further into the darkest abysses of surrealism. Not dissimilar to an auditory experimental horror film or to a stripped down version of Portal playing experimental doom, the work traces the grotesque lineaments of a disfigured subterranean hellscape through a masterful use of surrealism, dissonance and compositional abstraction. Slow, crushing, atonal dirges alternate lumbering behemoth-like trudges and enigmatic tectonic upheavals that build an immense ominous aura as the album unfolds a dense, mephitic atmosphere draped in malevolent ambience. The album’s monolithic and agonizing crawl is then violently disrupted by onslaughts of wrathful disturbances, where bursts of demented blasting, tortured screams and mangled fretwork blindside the listener, casting them further down the abyss, into a bottomless sepulcher of confusion and of complete chthonic torment.
LP $23.95
02/28/2025