Grave Miasma – “έσχατος”

Grave Miasma - Odori Sepulcrorum

Grave Miasma – “έσχατος”

Grave Miasma - Odori Sepulcrorum

Much of the old school death metal (OSDM) revival is about resurrecting, so to speak, the feeling and tone of the classic death metal records from the mid ’80s – early ’90s. Of course, seemingly all but a few of the original bands from that time are pretty active at present, either having soldiered on in some capacity for the last few decades or having re-formed due to renewed interest. Morbid Angel are touring this fall to celebrate the 20th anniversary of their 1993 classic Covenant; Carcass are set to release their first new album in 17 years, Surgical Steel, a stunning work that sounds like it could have been released in 1995. Lots of newer bands, though, have gone even further back — New Jersey’s Disma, Sweden’s Morbus Chron, and Israel’s Sonne Adam, to name a few prominent examples — to a pre-digital period when death metal was a thing of dark, cavernous, anonymous ambient horror. It’s not necro — the black metal recording “technique” that shuns all but the most rudimentary tools in favor of the rawest possible end product — it’s analog, vintage. Few bands have achieved this more impressively and convincingly than England’s Grave Miasma, whose forthcoming debut LP, Odori Sepulcrorum, evokes the same engulfing, diabolical chill as Morbid Angel’s Altars Of Madness, Autopsy’s Mental Funeral, or Incantation’s Onward To Golgotha. But something about Odori Sepulcrorum feels even more menacing and vast than the music it references; like the 1980 Italian horror film Cannibal Holocaust, it seems somehow terrifying, timeless, and real. We’ve already heard one track from the album, “Ovation To A Thousand Lost Reveries,” and now, one more: “???????” (some help with the pronunciation here?), which shifts from doomy desperation to raw shred to some amorphous, insanity-inducing gothic nightmare. Cult. Listen.

Odori Sepulcrorum is out 9/17 via Profound Lore.

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