Labels: Relapse
Review by: Alex Deller
There were doubtless more than one or two who greeted the prospect of Inverloch material with thin-lipped apprehension. Put it this way: two members of legendary Aussie death-doom troupe diSEMBOWELMENT back in action on the reunion circuit and deciding things were going so swimmingly with their new chums that they’d sling some new material into the void for anyone interested enough to listen. While the omens mightn’t have been too heartening the results are, in fact, stellar, the band prising open diSEMBOWELMENT’s coffin lid with coiling death metal riffs; laboured doom thumps; sphincter-puckering guitar leads and no small amount of ambience while setting themselves apart as a separate and thoroughly modern entity rather than one trying to recapture something long-since lost. The three songs here are best served as a single, unbroken experience, the all-too-brief 22 minutes demonstrating not just brutish heaviness but subtle shifts of sound and graceful changes of texture that make the loping, inbred gait of Autopsy seem not just compatible with the sensitive ponderings of Corrupted or Thergothon but suggest they’re the kind of comely bedfellows that should never have been wrested from each others’ rapidly-cooling grasp.