Eternal Rot is a three-piece from the UK, and they play some lumbering, shambling death doom with some of sickest, moistest, icky gurgling vocals I’ve heard since Seep’s Souvenirs of a Necrosadist EP back in 2020. Moribound is their third album, but I’ll be certainly checking out the prior two albums as this is pretty groovy, oozing stuff, befitting the classically minimalist Mark Riddick artwork.

Beyond the vocals, this is a must-have for fans of the aforementioned Seep (or anything from Gurgling Gore Records), Disma, Ungergang, Grave, Hooded Menace, and Coffins, with whom they shared a split with back in 2021, but boy do those vocals steal the show.  But also, throw in some surprisingly catchy riffs here and there, and you get a release that makes for a short but dense, cavernous, down-tuned but icky 34 minutes.

“Summoned from Moribound Delusions” starts the affair, and has a couple of things that got my attention other than the vocals. if you listen carefully as the song goes on, you can start to hear a crazy female choral arrangement going on in the background, that crescendoes with an unsettling cacophony at the song’s end. There’s also a little keyboard bridge and the transition to a nifty groove at about 2:45 in shows these guys can mix it up as well as just deliver sloppy dirges for an entire album.

But sloppy dirges are the main attraction and the rest of the album and the next 6 songs deliver in soupy, mushy, hefty spades. “Reflected in Perpetual Waves of Despair” comes out the gate with a huge, rumbling groove, while “Swollen Corpse Adoration” has an almost stoner doom gait and vibe (with a little break about 2:15 and other points in the song that could be from any Bongzilla album), all the while with those layered disgusting vocals keeping things truly sick.

The wonderfully named “Desecrated Guts” starts with distorted monkish chants, before a creaking door signals the start of a zombie horde doing zombie horde things and the song then delivers 4 minutes of disgustingly heavy heft and simple doom-death riffage that absolutely crushes.

“Gestures Never Recalled” and closer “Lurker in the Morgue” bring back that stoner doom vibe, but the stoner isn’t some hesher dude, it’s a decayed corpse smoking a bowl as his guts tumble from his stomach cavity and plumes of zombified bong smoke pour from the recessed rotten cavity.

[Visit the band's website]

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