UNBLESSED DIVINE ~ Portal To Darkness (2023)

 Destructive, satanic death metal featuring former Malevolent Creation and Sinister members. Portal To Darkness is as dark and unforgiving as you're likely hear in a death metal album. Bludgeoning riffs merge with gothic sounding keyboards creating an atmosphere of spiritual unease and a sense of foreboding. Each track is a ferocious onslaught forcing you to your knees, head bowed, arms raised aloft in Satanic rapture.

SAMHAIN ~ The Courier 2023 (Remastered)

This early death/thrash classic has been resurrected and remastered with a mix that is beyond anything I could have hoped for. Although it is a compilation of the band's first two demo tapes, The Courier is essentially in two parts. The first three tracks are from the 1985 Samhain demo 'The Courier' while the final five songs are from 1986 when the band morphed into DesExult and released the demo S.O.D. F.O.A.D. 

Samhain play a raw, chaotic form blackened death/thrash on The Courier, lacerating from the opening track and creates bloody mayhem right the way through to the last with some glorious breakdowns inbetween not heard since Celtic Frost's Morbid Tales.

An essential release which deserves to be unearthed from a band way ahead of it's time.

 

TUMULATION ~ Haunted Funeral Creations (2023)

Tumulation is something of a supergroup consisting of members of bands wallowing in the lower regions of the 'Filth Pit' such as Conjureth, Messial, Sarcosium, Decrepitaph and more! regurgitatting repulsive Death/Doom harking back to the glory days of the early 90's. There are no frills with Haunted Funeral Creations, each track is fully immersed in a nightmarish vision of final judgement not just relying on the tried and trusted Death/Doom formula, instead, agonisingly stretching the pain into Funeral Doom and even tenuously, grind territory creating various layers of depravity. Modern recording methods enhance the overall claustrophobic atmosphere of the album, enhancing an aura of foreboding that bleeds through the clotted pores of each seething track.

For fans of: Autopsy, Winter, Blood Incantation, Hooded Menace, Paradise Lost, Incantation

ABSORB ~ Rot (2023)

Harrowing death/doom with a pall of fetid air hanging over a thick layer of crust. The doom and death elements interlace into a malignant, dissonant, scabrous lesion. Rot is described as an EP but is in fact a full album slaughterhouse of indiscriminate bloodletting.

ADVERSVM ~ Vama Marga (2023)

The third album from German Funeral Doom/Death band Adversvm this time featuring Don Zaros of EVOKEN as the band's new and permanent keyboard player. Riffs are carniverous with an immense bite radius ensuring Adversvm's evolving position among the top apex predators of this particular genre. The introduction of Zaros has added layers of 'what's lurking under the bed' creepiness to the overall oppressive atmosphere and there will be the inevitable comparison to EVOKEN which is warranted and  fine by me as that is one of my favourite bands, but what sets these doom titans slightly apart is the willingness of  Adversvm to gouge an even deeper furrow of bludgeoning doom/death interwoven with chilling, spine tingling intricacy.

One of, if not THE  album of the month for June

IMPERISHABLE - Come, Sweet Death (2023)

Raging Swedish death metal pitted with some surprisingly exquisite lead work.  Coming from Sweden, there will be the usual comparisons and rightly so, but what makes Imperishable a cut above their contemporaries, is that the standard HM2 'buzzsaw' guitar, although evident, doesn't saturate the overall sound, making Come, Sweet Death  sound leaner and even more brutal than the likes of Dismember and Entombed who are obvious influences.

CENOBITE ~ Torment Your Flesh And Explore The Limits Of Experience (2023)

 HM-2  enshrouded  in the destructive, rampaging force of Hail Of Bullets and Bolt Thrower and consumed by the gloomy morbidity of Asphyx. Cenobite wallows in your pain and celebrates your abhorrence.