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CEREMONIAL BLOODBATH
Genesis Of Malignant Entropy

Sentient Ruin Laboratories (2023)
Rating: 8.5/10

Genesis Of Malignant Entropy is the second full-length album from Canadian destroyers Ceremonial Bloodbath and is the ideal accompaniment for a descent into the coldest and blackest abyss. You need to be in the mood for such a devastating portrayal of crushing black-death because this comes as a series of hellish blasts that blow ice and ash through subterranean crypts.

The band did more than rattle the bones with their 2020 debut The Tides Of Blood, and just to cement their place in your pulverised brain they continue with their brand of raw, abyssal energy. There are traces of bestial war metal, sprigs of dank doom and primitive sneers of black metal, but whichever gloomy path is trodden, the atmosphere remains foreboding and above all unforgiving.

Opening track ‘Exhumation Of The Ominous’ is a thunder train and is utterly ferocious, despicable and blinding in its hammering as the band volleys off numerous violent riffs, grisly percussive snaps and the sort of blackened billowing hate that the likes of Beherit, Blasphemy and Conqueror made their own. It’s not pretty and deep breaths are required in between tracks; ‘Bloodlust Raids Of Vengeance’, ‘Loathing Swarm’ and ‘Dissonance Of Morbidity’ drip with a satanic humidity so primeval that to fully appreciate and absorb such grotesque spectacles one must throw themselves down a manhole and spend several weeks in a sewer among the rats and scum.

Violent blasts of Bestial Warlust integrate with fizzes of Proclamation, but there is something extra and far more horrific that lurks here, the result being the nightmarish brood that is ‘Caustic Invocation’ that stinks of sick fumes while boasting billowing angles of twisted horror. Elsewhere, ‘The Boneless One’ is melodious in its malformed morbidity as the guitars squirm like feverish parasites through body soil.

Utmost formidable horror is ever-present here for what is one of the year’s most potent affairs – an album not for the faint of heart or mind.

Neil Arnold

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