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CIVEROUS
Maze Envy

20 Buck Spin (2024)
Rating: 8/10

Suffocating. Crushing. Bludgeoning. Heavy. Just a handful of words to describe the second full-length experience from Los Angeles, California-based Civerous. Again we are treated to another garish album cover within this ever burgeoning scene of kaleidoscopic death metal as Lord Foul leads his gang through a batch of tunes whose effect bears similar resemblance to being crushed by an anaconda.

The impact of the riffs is akin to having several tons of wet cement dropped on your feeble body, while the percussion is a dense avalanche accompanied by the baseball bat to the head bass. It’s foul, disgusting and dragging as the combo drills into us a formula of black death n’ pulverising doom constructed of colossal black stone pillars, thick sweating walls and morbidly designed monoliths.

‘Shrouded In Crystals’ is blessed with a ravenous degree of technicality within its boulder-sized framework of dense and bloated mechanics. Unorthodox shifts in tempo exist within such blubbery folds before a convoy of slamming paralyses the listener with the forefront pounding of drums. In fact, skinsman Aidan Neuner sounds like he’s bashing concrete slabs with a pneumatic drill. In between such harsh, cataclysmic hammering the band allows one to take a breather with some serene passages. But for the most part the rhythms are steady and consuming slabs, particularly the immense title track with its persistent grinding.

Lord Foul’s tone is always a chesty bellowing amidst the feral haze of clustered blasts and stifling traipsing. It’s not exactly doom metal or remotely old school or ridden with crust, but its general atmosphere nods towards some of the sludge hardcore nuances mixed with death metal. The album does tend to feel too long even though it runs for just 42 minutes, but it’s a minor quibble and the positives certainly outweigh any negatives.

The riffs throughout are massively chunky and come in their droves on ‘Labyrinth Charm’, which features Derek Rydquist of The Zenith Passage on guest vocals. Civerous are also adept at injecting unorthodox passages too, particularly on the progressive ‘Levitation Tomb’ where pastoral landscapes are conjured. But for the utmost slab we have to dive into the realms of ten-minute closer ‘Geryon (The Plummet)’ which is rich in atmosphere and mournful in its traipsing.

The more I play the opus the more diversity I find within the blackened chugging. Most certainly an improvement from the band’s 2021 debut Decrepit Flesh Relic, Maze Envy is somewhat hip n’ happening in terms of how the scene is being transformed, but it’s also an opus that is perfectly suited to the 20 Buck Spin roster.

Neil Arnold

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