impetuous ritual blight upon martyred sentience

The production is exacting in it’s spaciousness allowing for a low-growl that resounds above blasting drums with the middle-range reserved for the guitar’s harassment. The guitars are still a shower of reverb-steeled horror but each layer serves tonal purpose and their rumblings are intelligible. This second album from Grave Upheaval makes their first seem like a cheap experiment made with material they were willing to toss under a blanket of rusted noise. Of course it invokes the gods of Disembowelment and less obviously Eternal Darkness ‘Ceremony of Doom’ when the atmospherics decide to curl up into death metal riffing. ‘(untitled)’ is somewhere in between the still murky ‘Blight upon Martyred Sentience’ and the ‘almost funeral doom’ resonance of ‘The Hecatomb’. Temple Nightside‘s guitarist BR is a key component of Grave Upheaval and his other band’s sound did something similar for their second full-length in 2016 where the atmosphere pulled from recording techniques and additional reverb, yet the mixing wasn’t tampered with to further obscure the tone of the entire recording. In fact this ‘(untitled)’ is true death/doom metal and not just intentional sonic obscuration. Preposterously ‘(untitled)’ a second time after a five year wait Grave Upheaval‘s latest posits what the project might sound like if they created true atmospherics rather than shrouding it in false illusory lo-fi grime. In fact they haven’t left the cavern, ‘the cavern’ was merely an illusion of depth. Similarly, Portal‘s violent technicality was made stark and doubly charged on ‘Ion’ and it was only a matter of time before Grave Upheaval made their case for existence beyond the souring depths of cavernous, obscured death metal. Impetuous Ritual the proverbial older brother of Grave Upheaval shares literal DNA and attendants but their rituals were made light with increased clarity on ‘Blight upon Martyred Sentience’.

To say that intentionally obscured production is a perfect defrock for so many sheep is an understatement and while the realm of intentionally shrouded atmospheric death metal is in drought conditions, the eldest roaches burn on. The egregious and precarious depths of atmospheric death metal’s venture into sunless tunnels, miles deeper than any Incantation-esque ‘cavern-core’, have been well-plumbed by other Portal related projects beyond the pernicious dissonance of ‘Swarth’.

Impetuous ritual blight upon martyred sentience