SHORT BUT SWEET: GAROTTING DEEP / FŌR — “VOID ASCETICISM”

 

(Andy Synn wrote this review of the new split by Garotting Deep (Canada) and FŌR (Sweden).)

So I recently stumbled upon Garotting Deep, a band whose name is a reference to the poisonous, polluted swamp-lands that play a pivotal role in Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

Colour me intrigued.

Even more interestingly, the band’s newest release is a split with Swedish grim lords FŌR, a band that Islander has actually drawn the site’s attention to several times before (HERE).

So colour me doubly intrigued… as long as that colour is a suitably fuliginous shade of Black.

 

Taking command of the first half of the split, the music of Garotting Deep is an ugly, buzzing quagmire of filthy Blackened atmospherics and lurching, Death Metal grime, swollen to bursting with heaving riffs and croaking, brackish vocals.

Opener “A Barrows of Moss” is all buzzing, hornet-like riffage and chaotic, cascading drums that spurt and splatter like blood from a severed artery. Amidst this dismal, churning muck and dense, choking murk, a sickening discharge of truly hideous vocals groans and gibbers and growls with primitive malevolence.

“Garotting Deep” continues the rotten, cadaverous vibe of its predecessor, channelling touches of early Entombed and Dismember through a prism of warped, crawling horror. The guitars slither and grind, choking any pretence of melody within their writhing coils, driven relentlessly onwards by an abhorrent display of vicious, spiteful drum work and foul vocal exhortations.

The Canadians’ final contribution is a cover of “Heimta Thurs”, originally by Norwegian Pagan-Folk ascetics Warduna, which replaces the sombre ambience of the original with an almost nauseating cloud of noxious dissonance and brooding menace, drowning all but the faintest hints of the song’s mood and melody beneath waves of vile desperation and despair.

 

For their part, FŌR offer up a similarly abrasive and all-consuming tide of distortion and loathing, beginning with the monolithic, doom-laden funeral march of “Behexed By Mortuary Chants”.

Bilious, sludge-soaked riffs and stomach-churning growls are combined with jarring eruptions of primitive blast-beats and toxic screams of boiling fury, as the song trudges and staggers and spasms through almost eight minutes of tormented musical convulsions.

The follow-up, “Spraekjo”, is three-and-a-bit minutes of tortured atmospherics and almost mindless, anguished vocals, which moan and screech as if in the throes of possession, leading into the split’s finale, the aural abomination that is “Nectars of Serpents”.

Hideous, abyssal growls and low, bowel-loosening riffs dominate the track, powered by a veritable avalanche of demoniac drum work, all combined into a whirling vortex of feverish chaos and dragging, juddering Doom, which draws you in with morbid, inexorable force.

 

https://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com/album/garotting-deep-f-r-void-asceticism
https://www.facebook.com/garottingdeep
https://www.facebook.com/theravenouschasm