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WORM
Gloomlord

Iron Bonehead Productions (2020)
Rating: 9/10

From the depths of Florida’s darkest and deepest holes squirms the warty, slithering leviathan that is Worm. These guys started out as a black metal group, but second opus Gloomlord sees the band evolving into a squelching, doom-ridden death metal cesspit of sound.

Slow, festering, mouldy and manky are four ideal words to describe such a bubbling peat bog of unwanted bacteria as this posse of perversion trudges wearily through an infected swamp of horror.

Just listen to the steaming remains of opener ‘Putrefying Swamp Mists At Dusk’ or the eight-minute squalid bog squabble of ‘Rotting Spheres Of Sentient Black’ for examples of how to suffocate oneself while listening to music. Imagine a pungent, humid swamp of toxic slop where bands such as Cerebral Rot and Fetid already co-exist by gouging out each other’s orifices and feasting on one another’s innards, and that’s the decrepit realm which Worm inhabits; a smouldering, mist-caressed quicksand terrain stinking of excrement and gunk and littered with soggy bark that leaks an intoxicating goo.

Gloomlord rarely dabbles in pace; the band at its fastest is a lumbering mid-paced limp made all the more deadly by the rasping vocal sneers which drag the sorry, oozing sound through mud and mire. But occasionally there’s an air of the cosmic too; dismal galactic voids which suggest that Worm’s pungent riffs and melancholic slumbers are from some otherworldly swamp.

Just feast your ears open the remote strains of ‘Apparitions Of Gloom’ which toy with dissonant black metal ideologies and yet which lumber with a doomy, fetid presence. Gloomy solos attempt to break from cloying algae and clinging weeds, but in an environment so damp one cannot only become one with the tangle of guitars, the plodding yet heavy weight percussion and dense bass lines which eventually break down your bones before your entire body succumbs to decomposition.

‘Melting In The Necrosphere’ is a nine-minute horror show that just drags you down into its stained gut; chords trickle in creepy manner as again those black metal styled rasps of horror and anguish reverberate around the cell walls, leaving you to question which plateau you’ve found yourself in. It’s best then to just marvel at such lengthy compositions rather than drown in the horror, because as another riff grumbles and a solo attempts to reach for the light, Worm just heaves you back in; its utterances so deep and dense.

The cloak of darkness and death falls with the closing 12-minute ‘Abysmal Dimensions’, revealing Worm as another of those colossal, cosmic monstrosities that exists beyond the realms of run-of-the-mill death and doom metal, yet combing both to create a humid and rotten air of muffled, bellowing terror.

Doom / death of such a cavernous nature is certainly the big thing at the moment, and Worm have become at one with such a scene, burrowing into their despicable terrain like parasitic night feeders at comfort in their damp, seeping bog of unearthly noise that exists by dragging sorry listeners into its gut. Gloomlord is another vile contender for best album of 2020, simple as that.

Neil Arnold

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