You ever find yourself faced with something that’s just unfathomably disgusting? You go reach into the back of the refrigerator and find a container of which it’s origin has been completely forgotten about… Is that Chinese food? When was the last time I even HAD Chinese food?!

You know you shouldn’t open that lid. You know you should just throw the fucking thing in the trash… and yet, something unexplainable pulls at your curiosity. What horrors have you created? What unspeakable abomination has manifested inside that container?

Slowly, you open the lid…

Oh god. OH GOD… The smell… The slime… THE FUZZ…

You retch. “What have I done?”

This, my friends, is something approaching the experience of pressing play on Void Rot’s Descending Pillars. The intro of the album’s opening, title track – building with suspense and unease, before the band opens the lid to reveal a vile, infected concoction of rotten, doomy death metal seemingly from another world. The difference, however, is that I fucking LOVE this. I want more of it. Unlike that container of 3-month-old Moo Shu Pork, I will consume every last bit of this with glee.

This is a band who is very much dedicated to creating as murky and gloomy an atmosphere as possible, like a slow, inevitable death via quick sand. Modern equivalents like Atavisma or Spectral Voice certainly come to mind as you make your way through these album’s 7 tracks. We’re not talking a technical fireworks display here, the band instead builds deep, overwhelmingly cavernous atmospheres that create a real sense of dread and Lovecraftian anxiety. On tracks like “Upheaval” and “Liminal Forms,” the band does an excellent job of playing back and forth between Bolt Thrower-like mid-paced rumbling, and blast beats that the band pairs with elongated, spatial notes that create a super unsettling contrast, wracking your nerves and making you feel a bit like you’re losing your mind (boy I’m really selling the shit out of this one, huh???)

“Inversion” and closer “Monolith: Descending Pillars Pt. 2” are much more straightforward in their attack, in that they’re both just fuckin HEFTY, methodical bruisers with the sole purpose of sucking you into the cosmic void from which these Minnesotans seemingly originated. The latter boasts some really simple but great, soaring leads over the rest of the band’s plodding, grinding heft and really serves as a highlight on this album, before officially seeing it out with a crushing, pounding outro that signals your unavoidable interdimensional doom. GNARLY.

If there’s any complaints to be had, you wouldn’t be out of line pointing out the lack of variety in tone or tempo here – the band pretty much picks a lane and sticks with it. But to that end, they’ve also created a fully immersive and distinctive atmosphere and setting  that very deliberately takes you to a disturbing and disgusting world of the band’s imagination. There’s no questioning what Void Rot set out to create here, and they’ve accomplished it with flying colors, and prove that despite your better judgements, there’s sometimes an undeniable need for the more vile and disgusting things in life.  Bring on the filth.

[Visit the band's website]

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