Encoffination:'Hear me, O'Death"

The full title is 3..Hear me, O'Death(Sing Thou Wretched Choirs). That's a little long for my taste, but their hearts are in the right places as this album is meant to exhalt death. Death worship is a worthy cause in my book so here we go. This American project crawled out of Father Befouled. With heavy Halloween window dressing, they launch into some pretty deathly doom. The vocals are so low they sound like dying breath of an Elder God echoing up from the bottom of the sea. The guitar lays a faster layer of tremolo picked guitar over the slower dirge pounding. This is very effective to create a dissonantly eerie mood. In many ways this band reminds me of Loss.

 There's a chord change and the next thing we know the album has moved onto 'Cemetaries of Purgation". it gets denser and darker like you have been buried alive by these thick riffs and the drums are shoveling the dirt down onto the coffin. As impressive as it is to create this feeling of claustrophobia, something can be said for songwriting and dynamics. This song really only digs deeper into the dynamics already established."Crowned Icons" play with similar frequency , but employs more atmosphere. The heavy chords thud out into the ether. The drums play around the sluggish low end of the guitar  that sounds to have swallowed their bass player whole.

"Rotting Immemorial" crumbles out of the preceding song. The vocals keep to the same patterns through out the album. The faster almost black metal guitar trembling over the hesitant beat, until it all comes once again to a crawl.There is something to be said about this albums drone, even if none of the parts to these songs are particularly memorable, aside from one section in "Rotting..." that sounds like Mary had a little lamb.

It begins to sound like down tempo black metal once we get to "From His Holy Cup Drink, Come Death." The vocals rise out of the submersed gurgle that they have plagued this album with. Cold melodies seeps from the corners of the feedback. Drums lead of 'Pale Voices' rather than the crunch of guitar that has dominated the album. 'Mould of Abandonment" finds the album fading out with more ambiance. The chords find grim beauty, but it is almost to little too late to really have made this one memorable. The funeral march of song does gather some steam in it's death throes, the drums vary and guitars space themselves out allowing a more comprehensible picture of what is going one.What this lacks is the very element that causes funeral doom to excel, that's the mournful guitar melodies. Instead we get a dense pounding, which is fine in some cases, but in others it causes things to drag. So due to this I'll give the album a 6. I like where these guys want to go with it, but with out proper shading in the realm of dynamics the songs sound like one slush heap of a riff. Still if you like straight forward and really slow doom it's not a bad listen. S