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ENGULFED IN BLACKNESS
Ceremonial Equinox

Pagan Pride (2014)
Rating: 4/10

Tennessee terrors Engulfed In Blackness probably didn’t have the best imagination when it came to naming their own band, but hey, some you win and some you lose. This is their debut album, however, following on from two 2013 demo releases. Not bad for a band that only formed in 2013, too!

The band play brutal death metal, which suffers rather badly from the poor drum sound and vocal blur that at times seems to merely go along with the rhythms rather than spout any intelligible words of structure.

Musically, Engulfed In Blackness are not overly heavy, although occasionally they do throw out a few catchy riffs, namely those on ‘Vomit The Impulse’, ‘Condemned To Existence’ and ‘Enthrallment’. For the most part though, this nine-track platter – with its awful cover – tends to flit by as a case of crash, bang, wallop due to those tinny drums. The band does find comfort between speedier elements and guttural death metal, but these segments are too few, and there’s a sense of the amateurish too in the whole feel of the opus.

Engulfed In Blackness are likely a young band, although the majority of the instruments and vocals are handled by Brandon Von. Those drums are merely machine (created through Beatcraft programming software) rather than human, which explains the awful tone of them.

Modern death metal has a long, long way to go before it occupies the same planet – let alone league – as the masters who made it their own decades ago, and my feeling is that bands such as Engulfed In Blackness will get nowhere should they rely on such irritating vocals which completely lack personality.

Having said that, the album does boast some minor moments of note, my favourite tracks being ‘Echoes In The Chasm’, with its brooding riffing, and the opener ‘Tortured Mentality’, with its more methodical approach. This is still rather bog-standard death metal though with major flaws, and a lot of work is going to have to be done to improve.

Personally, if I was Engulfed In Blackness I’d have opted for an EP release to test the waters, but as it stands this outing is a lukewarm affair that hints at the likes of Cannibal Corpse but never once gets close to even imitating its peers due to its inability to engulf the listener in anything remotely interesting.

Neil Arnold

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