Desolate Shrine : "The Heart of the Netherworld"

I found these guys hunting the Internet for new doom...which by the way I am still looking for because this album is great but it's not doom, but it is very dark death metal.Opens with a dense and chilling instrumental.The vocals come in higher than expected. There are some lower roars, but I think roars and screams are better verbs to describe the vocals than growl.The melody the guitars hold lies over some fairly brutal battery. The production on this album is how death metal should sound. It's not over produced and too slick, but it's not under produced so it doesn't sound like they are playing in your crawlspace. The drumming is tasteful. Devil, knows death metal is the genre where the overpowering drums are in the right place. Once I start listening for the drums I realize I can't hear his feet. The drums play behind the wall of sound the guitars have created. So if you need double bass all the time, then this might not be the band for you.

Quite a few bands have tried to achieve the Ulcerate sound. These guys capture it but without trying to sound like Ulcerate. They left you up for a breath on the song "Desolate Shrine" . I am not sure about bands who name songs after themselves and that goes for you to Black Sabbath, but this is pretty tasty in the most ghoulish manner possible. They do not remind me of any other band from Finland. They are not trying to cop any Swedish death metal influence, this is far dirtier and sonic than that. Most death metal bands have already blown their wad after the first song and hit me with everything they have leaving me waiting around to see what else they can do which is usually more of the same. These guys made me forget that I was waiting around for them to prove that they could write songs because it was evident they could from the onset. The grow in sonic fury on "Death in You"

At first it seems like there is not a minute wasted on the over 14 minutes of "We Dawn Anew", but around the nine minute mark before the songs starts to speed up, it drones me out and I detach from the song.Then it carries on from there and I am not aware that this has turned into "Leviathan". They close things out with another long one in the title track that starts off blast beating you back and blue before recoiling into a groove of sorts. This eventually winds up in a dark a melodic place that I would one day like to hear them expand upon. I'll give this an 8.5, but it could evolve into a 9 as it held me in more often than not and with more listens I think I would grow to dig this more .The only thing that would hold me back is some of the longer songs.