RSS Feed


ABYSSAL RIFT
Extirpation Dirge

Sentient Ruin Laboratories (2023)
Rating: 9/10

Being the creation of multi-instrumentalist Matt Auxier (6th Circle and Ash Prison), who is joined here by Unyielding Love drummer David Mahoney, Columbus. Ohio-based Abyssal Rift is a bewildering death metal act that should come with a warning sign.

This debut full-length release offers up six tracks – ‘The Plague’, ‘The Rune’, ‘The Magister’, ‘The Scourge’, ‘The Eye’ and ‘The Mourning’ – and from the first chord this album is an avalanche of riffs and leads; an all-encompassing and devouring flurry that drags one into cold, mechanical webs of extremity that match Morbid Angel or Immolation with something more complex and inescapable. Several listens in and I felt like I was aimlessly wandering around a thorny maze, with each treacherous turn finding myself lost among a labyrinth of devastating percussion and twisted riffs.

It’s not as if Abyssal Rift play overly technical death metal, in fact it isn’t far removed from the already mentioned Immolation and the likes, but it’s just that it is so damn impenetrable like some great wall of gloomy gauze. This album unravels like a vast abyss of Incantation-styled doominess; thick and cloying, throbbing with an evil humidity and providing relentless scurrying gusts of freezing air within the damp contours of Hell.

The spearing, stabbing leads within ‘The Rune’ are mischievous and evasive, scurrying through the dark as vermin but leading us to more hidden, colossal horrors. The vocals throughout are spawned from some deep, boggy trench and ascend as grim gasps of sticky mist as ‘The Scourge’ attests. It’s a foul domain of dripping precipices, bottomless chasms for abysmal echoes to bounce off. ‘The Eye’ is the finest example of what utter misery these guys can construct, a vast gaping ravine of despair where eerie trudges resonate as if the plateaus are shifting.

Extirpation Dirge is a fitting debut that wallows in its own miserable odour before casting off toxic particles and spores with its more agitated throes. Mighty, morbid and hellish, this really is the deadliest dirge of dank debuts.

Neil Arnold

<< Back to Album & EP Reviews



Related Posts via Categories
Share