Despite not being overly prolific, (only one EP, The Dagger and the Chalice and one album, Abysmal Thresholds, along with a split and a 7″ since 2011) Finland’s Corpsessed remains my favorite Dark Descent Records band- no small feat when you consider the label’s quality over the years. So this has been one of my most anticipated releases of 2018, and it does not fucking disappoint.
Armed with arguably one of 2018’s most monstrous productions, Impetus of the Dead is a landslide of pure doom-ridden cavernous death metal. Much like “Invocation/Of Desolation” from the debut album, the title track gets things rolling with a short foreboding atmospheric intro before unleashing a miasma of regal, filthy atonal death metal that lumbers with tangible force and menace. The influences continue to draw from Incantation, Immolation, Ulcerate, Gorguts and such with the inherent 90s Finnish death metal crumble, but its performed with a mastery depth and heft that puts them at the apex of the scene.
The album’s next few tracks deliver more urgent, fetid throes of dissonant chaos as “Sortilege”, “Endless Plains of Dust” and “Graveborne” blast, lope, and stagger with palpable density and force. There are some (for lack of a better term) bass drops that will shake you to your core and along with Niko Matilainen’s cavernous bellows, makes for a fearsome racket. The balance between pure, Lovecraftian, horror-inducing chaos and slower, more controlled nightmares is perfect as displayed on “Paroxysmal” and one of my favorite cuts from the album, “Forlorn Burial”, one of the album’s more varied, slower, oozing tracks. Ironically, the penultimate number”Begetter of Doom”, is the album’s shortest track and most punishing tracks.
But even with the slower loping moments, I’m thinking man, I wish these guys would deliver something way slower, something more truly monstrous and doomy, and lo and behold the album rounds out with a 10 minute beast in “Starless Event Horizon”, the band’s longest song to date and one of the more immense and oppressive death/doom metal tracks of recent memory. It builds with expected nauseating dread and then rumbles with pure, dripping, crawling, ichor before settling into a steady double bass rumble, a quick blasting throttle than back to a sickening slower gait to close out the album with horrific, crumbling, splendor.
Dark Descent does not have bad years, but 2018 is shaping up to be the label’s best in a while with this, Vanhelgd, Hyperdontia, Burial Invocation, Skeletal Remains, Crimson Relic’s reissue, Ritual Necromancy and the lovely Solstice cherry on top.
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