Monday, December 14, 2020

Haunted Cenotaph - Abyssal Menace (2020)


Here, we see Haunted Cenotaph at their most primitive... and in the end; we have quite a beast of an album.This is very much a straight-up, death/doom affair here. The songs stay down tempo and rarely go beyond that. You've got sort of slow with brutal riffs. While the music here isn't flashy or technical, the song structures are well thought out, and very effective at generating a lush, dark & somber atmosphere. The guitar tone here packs a lot of punch, and the riffs are heavy as all fuck. They pummel its listener with slow, monstrous blows until every bone in their body is crushed. On a couple of occasions, they will break into acoustic passages, in which they do a fantastic job of creating a beautiful, haunting atmosphere. This sets it up for the heavy parts to hit even harder and feel much more aggressive. The drumming while not doing anything over top, it still does a great job at maintaining a powerful, precise rhythm throughout the entire album. Gut wrenching vocal performance, yet vocalist performance is still brutal as hell, and he does a pretty good job of pronouncing the lyrics so they can be somewhat easily understood. I highly recommend this for any fans of death/doom, as well as anyone who doesn't really know much about the genre and wants to see what it has to offer.

hauntedcenotaph.bandcamp.com

Review by Paul Caravasi


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