With all the complexity and technicality being thrown around in death metal this year, the third full length album from Japan’s Coffins is a welcome relief of earthy, primal mid paced doom/death metal that will appeal to fans of Cianide, Runemagick and Autopsy.

With a phlegmy, hacking, feedback drenched, down-tuned guitar tone plying simple oozing riffs backed by deep grunts and a lethargic but dense rhythm section, Coffins are hardly groundbreaking, but in an era of triggered, clicky death metal, their oozing, volcanic pace and groovy riffs offer a simple, guilty pleasure.

With a their molten guitar tone and dense riffs, Coffins could certainly have some appeal to the pure doom crowd, even stoner and classic doom because of the fuzzed out guitar tone, but by the same token there’s lots of heaving, atonal heft such as opener “Under the Stench”, “Buried Death”, “Cadaver Blood”, and the draining “Mortification To Ruin” that are certainly far more death metal, and cements the Autopsy (think “In the Dead of Winter”) influence with a sick, feedback laden scrawl. When the band does pick up the tempo on “Deadly Sinners” and “Purgatorial Madness” it’s a mere, almost punkish, classic paced trot, and it does break up the oppressive pace, but there’s always that Autopsy ick lurking beneath the Cianide/Celtic Frost worshiping crust.

Closer, “The Frozen Styx” is a nasty 8 minute crawler puts the nail in the literal Coffin on this release that’s a breath of fetid, nauseating air in the fresh face of polished of nowadays death metal.

[Visit the band's website]

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