What foul interdimensional gloop is this? Ah, yes, the first full-length from Costa Rican manglers Astriferous.
Neatly summed up by the swirling vortex of leering grotesques adorning the sleeve, ‘Pulsations From The Black Orb’ is all kinds of wrong: a fleshy, swarming mass of insectile limbs, chittering beaks and globular eyes that, for all its repellant nature, is somehow impossible to drag yourself away from.
After a bout of woozy ambience we’re into the soft, rotten meat of the thing: putrid, pockmarked death metal that frequently tips over into slavering, slow-motion doom. Riffs creak, crack and unfold as though they have far too many joints in them, while the lurching doom parts remain attached to the wider corpus via pale organic tubes and gluey strings of skin.
Brief acoustic interlude ‘Forlorn And Immemorial’ is curiously tasteful, but in a way serves only to better illuminate the vileness elsewhere: a gibbering collision of Finnish and Floridian death metal influences that seeks to explore horrors that are both metaphysical and monstrously, undeniably real.