Sidious is the side project from some of the members of UK doom act Eye of Solitude, and while I generally don’t dig EPs (musical cock teasers), Ascension to the Throne Ov Self is a fucking killer little 4-song release, and I very much look forward to a full-length.

Sidious is a complete 180 from Eye of Solutide‘s plodding funeral doom and renders a bombastic symphonic style of blackened death metal that melds classic (Enthrone Darkness Triumphant, Spiritual Black Dimensions, PEM) Dimmu Borgir‘s epic symphonics, albeit much meaner and sinister and Behemoth’s (as if the ‘Ov’ in the EP title didn’t give it away) muscular beefy death metal. The result is a criminally short, 4-song, 18-minute taster of something pretty special lurking and germinating in the UK’s black/death metal scene.

With a big, almost cyber death metal guitar tone and deep, death metal vocals, the backbone is more death than black metal, but every song has a almost continual Fleshgod Apocalypse-like symphonic accompaniment, though a bit less regal and classical and more theatrical, again sounding like Dimmu Borgir‘s more memorable synth lines. The Dimmu Borgir element also comes by way of some spoken atmospheric whispers and croaks here and there amid the huge bellows.

But for the most part, Sidious blasts and bellows away with a tangibly Polish sense of dynamics and militant brute force. Fierce blast beats collide with stern marches and sudden flourishes of atmosphere as each of the 4 songs is has leveling sense of power and confidence. From opener “Insurmountable Mass” through “Sentient Race” and “Nihilistic Regeneration”, to the closing title track, this EP rips pretty hard and forcefully announces the presence of a UK band to keep an eye on.

[Visit the band's website]

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