Obed Marsh : " Innsmouth"

With nasty rasped vocals this sludged dipped doom band delves into Lovecraft. It sounds like their singer is being turned into an aspect of Dagon as he croaks his guts out. It's the gloomy lethargy the opening song is paced with that solidifies this as doom in my book. Their are some low chanted vocals, but for the majority of the seven minutes you are spewed out. If you can dig into your nightmares and try to fathom how something could sound even darker than than this, you would find it is the sound of demon disembowelment that occurs on the second song.Here the band is face with the challenge I pose to other bands who reach the extreme degrees of heaviness...o.k now what else can you do ? The answer is still murky midway into the second song.

One thing these guys should be commended for is not feeling obligated to write songs over ten minutes.They do create a droning ambiance of sorts in places without having to drag it out for extended periods of time."Usurpers" lets the pound of the drum linger, but still stays under seven minutes even though guitar doesn't kick in for the first minute. My question is answered by the atmosphere  that hangs off this song like cobwebs dripping with slime. They excel in touching on a place that makes them as heavy sonically as they are metal. There is more of a metallic cloud of noise overwhelming the oppressive " Deficient". While it works off of a similar throb that has worked so well up to this point at four minutes in I begin to think it needs something more dynamic to break things up.

The longest song comes in at ten minutes and carries a more funeral doom like guitar melody that floats over it . The snare sound on this song is rawer. The song wallows in the distortion of the final minutes. "Seeping Wombs"has a more sinewy riff. It's more fuzzed out and tramples you under it's weight, but doesn't do much more to provide a greater sense of dynamics to the album as a whole.  Going into this know that for the duration you are in for crushing doom with the filth of death metal coating it. These guys should get props for having some of the wickedest growls set to record this year. Normally after a few songs growling can get old for me if it is not varied yet here it works. I'll round this one up to a 9.