In 2022 UK deathcore/slam titans Ingested dropped Ashes Lie Still, a more experimental and tempered album that showed the band’s more introspective side as frontman Jason Evans dealt with the loss of his father. The band also clearly saw some of the success Whitechapel had with their duo of The Valley and Kin, as more progressive elements showed up in the band’s usual hefty deathcore.
Well, the second stage of grief is anger, and here Evans has channeled the loss of his father into a far angrier album than Ashes Lie Still, as Ingested seems to have veered back into a sound more akin to 2020 Where Only Gods May Tread. That is to say, there is still a progression from the band’s early “Intercranial Semen Injection” days but this album has less keyboards, less clean singing, no female vocals, and just seems more brutal and less bleak than Ashes Lie Still.
What there is plenty of though is mid-paced, shoulder swaying, head bobbing grooves and loping breakdowns in spades. as if to announce the band’s return to a little more of a brutal sound in massive fashion, album opener “Paragon of Purity” sets the tone out of the gate, the exact opposite of the opening title track from Ashes Lie Still. “Endless Machine” slightly more moody “Where No Light Shines” and pummeling mid-paced bruiser “Expect to Fail” continue the album’s early bludgeoning pace.
Just as the album starts to get a bit repetitive, as the pace and lurch of the Ov Sulphur-ish “Starve the Fire” starts to sound a bit familiar, the band throws the album’s first curve ball with the melodic, atmospheric instrumental number “Numinous”. However, “In Nothingness” and savage “Pantheon” return to the burly, lumbering throes of the album’s first few tracks.
The album’s last 2 tracks are the longest, with “Kingdom of Sand” at 5 and half minutes delivering more of the album’s now familiar mid-paced stomp and the 7-minute closer “A Path Once Lost” finally an Ashes Lie Still-like number with clean crooning and a more ballad-like prose and pace that ends the album on a more introspective note.
The Tide of Death and Fractured Dreams is another solid addition to the band’s growing discography that sees the band continue to sit atop the UK deathcore/slam heap, even with some subtle changes to their prior sound.
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