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GHOULGOTHA
The Deathmass Cloak

Dark Descent (2015)
Rating: 8.5/10

It looks like 2015 is going to be a murky year if the debut album from this San Diego, California-based horde is anything to go by. Ghoulgotha is a doomy death metal outfit which formed in 2012 and has released a demo (No Peace To Rest In), an EP (Prophetic Oration Of Self), and a split seven-inch single with Italy’s Into Darkness previous to this.

The Deathmass Cloak is a much anticipated release for me; even more so as Horrendous guitarist Damian Herring is behind the production. So, what we get is an album that runs for just over 50 minutes and consists of ten doomy extreme metal choice cuts.

Ghoulgotha play a rather mournful and stuffy style of death metal; it’s a sound born from the gruff vocal coughs of frontman W. Sarantopoulos and made all the more ghoulish by C. Koryn’s excellent percussive performance. His tidy thuds and mouldy thumps smother the record as the equally sordid leads crawl their way through the mossy rhythm section of W. Sarantopoulos’s guitar which festers throughout as a mid-paced quagmire of mossy depression.

‘Gazing Into Melted Night’ is a repulsive death metal ditty of doom-laden aplomb, and even when the band does decide to up the pace we are smothered by the suffocating trudge of ‘A Neck For The Nameless Noose’ with its eerie meanderings and sepulchral air. Indeed, the whole album has a real rank feel to it as it oozes malevolently like some giant, blood-gorged pack of rats gradually secreting itself across the floor to the next victim. This is how death metal should be played, especially when it injects a few unexpected jarring twists and pacier, rusty gallops.

‘Arteries Unblest’ is typical of the band’s infected, brooding atmospheres and its despicable ability to shift up a gear in order to exist as some loping manifestation of mould. But for added pulverisation, look no further than the grumpy charge of ‘Citadel Of Heathen Flesh’ and its equally putrid partner in crime, the groove-based ‘Cartilage Imperfect’ which at times reminds me of Carcass at its most surgically precise and blood-crusted.

Ghoulgotha are masters at supplying antiquated breakdowns which creak and groan with their weight, and so any fans of death metal circa the early 90s is sure to be impressed by an album which whines, groans and hisses like a bloated corpse exhumed from the silt. One can only drown in the murky horrors of this debut decomposition such is its watery quality throughout and The Deathmass Cloak is going to take some beating when it comes to the death metal genre.

Neil Arnold

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