It has been our hideous pleasure to premiere two tracks from the staggering and slaughtering debut album of the Italian death metal band Burial, and today we’re even more fiendishly pleased to bring you a stream of the full album, evocatively titled Inner Gateways To The Slumbering Equilibrium At The Center Of Cosmos and graced by the ghastly cover art of maestro Paolo Girardi.
Everlasting Spew Records, who will release the record on October 29th, recommends it for fans of Spectral Voice, Mortiferum, Krypts, and dISEMBOWELMENT. We recommend it for anyone who relishes expertly written and meticulously executed death metal which succeeds in creating a wide-ranging amalgam of unearthly terrors, ranging from assaults of mind-mauling, bone-splintering barbarity to episodes of crushing gloom and hypnotic supernatural trances steeped in woe.
Of course we have our own further impressions to provide, detailed ones in this case — but don’t hesitate to start the player running right away.
Burial launch the album in horrific fashion with “The Curse Of The Unbornlike God“, first manifesting itself as a lurching monstrosity of dissonant distorted chords, heaving low-frequencies, and gargantuan roars. The lead guitar seethes like a disease within this oppressive, lumbering titan but, preceded by melancholy ringing notes, the music convulses in a paroxysm of savage, swarming riffing, slaughtering drums, and macabre growls and howls from a throat seemingly filled with blood and bone fragments.
The rapid galloping and pounding grooves in this onslaught are still potent enough to work your neck, but the dominant impression is still one of unhinged violence — chainsaws roaring, shrill guitars screaming in a fever, drums hammering with a will. Near the end that great shaggy beats reappears, remorselessly dragging us with it as it groans and gibbers, toward an abyss of doom and despair.
With a gruesome roar, “Halls Of The Formless Unraveler“ surges in a storm of blistering drums, and maniacal, mind-mangling riffage that feeds on the mind with a deep toxic tone and a dense, swarming impact. Just as suddenly, the frenzy vanishes, replaced by dismal, moaning chords, ponderous beats, and mysterious glinting notes. When the vicious assault resumes, haughty and harrowing growls issue imperious proclamations as the guitars dart and swirl. Melodious notes slowly ring, creating a stirring contrast with the light-speed percussion and the mauling riffage.
The pacing of the song is dynamic throughout. In the slower movements, crushing hopelessness reigns, especially when the lead guitar eerily quivers and chimes in misery. In the spasms of speed, a feeling of demented violence comes through. Those cavernous, echoing vocals add to the music’s atmosphere of horror and degradation, and the melodic accents add a chilling aura of the supernatural. And thus the song is both hideous and haunting, assaulting and anguished, unearthly and oppressive. It has the capacity to hypnotize, and to create harrowing emotional disturbances.
Both of those opening tracks are long ones, and they’re followed by a pair that are shorter, but still longer than average. “Absent Visions Conceive Unspeakable Beings” again demonstrates Burial‘s proclivity for varying the pace, the mood, and the sonic textures of their ghastly creations, interweaving mysterious shimmering synths and a clean reverberating guitar melody to create a mesmerizing yet both melancholy and menacing instrumental interlude over slow, head-bobbing beats. But the music becomes considerably more unnerving, creating a seizure of unhinged abrasion, spurred to further heights of derangement by full-throttle drums.
With “Dark Womb Of Outern Creation“, the band begin with a cold, haunting, grief-stricken segue from the preceding track, and then use a boiling guitar to build the music toward another bone-smashing, disemboweling assault of turbocharged fury that manages to become both suffocating and crazed, stripped of hope and frenzied with fear, and concluding in the way it began — steeped in dejection.
Moving seamlessly, the album closes with the title track, which is a mammoth song, both in its length and in the stunning impact of the nightmarish musical sensations it presents. It sounds like a monstrous intrusion from some horrifying realm beyond our own plane of existence. Delivered again with mind-scraping chainsaw distortion and a stalking rhythm, the opening chords create a feeling of implacable gloom, and frantic screaming leads lend a feeling of encroaching madness.
The drums begin to hammer and bludgeon, and the turgid and torturous riffing becomes increasingly more heated and demented, bulldozing toward the advent of cruel cavernous roars, scary screams, and deliriously squirming guitars.
There’s a break in these calamitous experiences, the drums slowing and otherworldly gleaming notes ringing in tones of anguish and mystery above the crawling and gouging abrasion in the low end. This interlude has a strangely entrancing effect despite how hopeless it sounds, though a collage of strange ambient emanations makes it an increasingly disturbing trance.
Eventually, the maelstrom begins to gradually rise again through momentous and mangling chords, booming drums, and fretwork spasms. The riffing again reaches a caustic boil, like a fiery miasma of disease and degradation, with the drums clattering and clobbering in a fury and the vocalist bellowing and howling like an enormous rabid beast.
At the end, the song again pounds and stomps, swathed in abrasion, and rumbles like a titanic juggernaut, with a final dose of hopeless melody quivering its way through towering detonations.
For info about how to pick up the album, check the links below. Everlasting Spew is releasing it in a wide array of physical formats (CD, tape, and vinyl), as well as digitally.
PRE-ORDER:
PHYSICAL: https://bit.ly/3CdQyPU
DIGITAL: https://bit.ly/3z4pTDm