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SANCTUARIUM
Into The Mephitic Abyss

BlackSeed Productions / Gurgling Gore (2023)
Rating: 9/10

Prepare yourself for one of 2023’s gloomiest releases as cavernous Spaniards Sanctuarium offload its debut full-length album like a heap of wet compost. This is some seriously dismal death metal and the last place I’d expect such grim, swampy evil to emerge from is Barcelona.

Into The Mephitic Abyss comprises of four lengthy tracks which squirm and ooze with abysmal aplomb. Even when any sort of pace is applied – such as on opener ‘Rotted Remnants’ – everything comes daubed with a suffocating dankness and foul, stifling stench.

Sanctuarium have mastered the art of old school morbidity, the vocals being remote, distant eruptions that echo through thick, humid walls of macabre axe work and dense, dull percussion. Hats off to the production team who were no doubt shovelling heaps of sodden peat into the studio while recording, just to stifle any sort of freshness.

Death-doom has never sounded so miserable; just check out the lumbering menace of the opening chords on ‘Decaying Among The Carcasses’, it’s utterly fetid as if each instrument is coated in pond muck. ‘Mephitic Abyss’ sees the band at its most aggressive, but the reek of mould and stale air still lingers on those hefty bass lines, while further intoxicating spores line the vocal huffs. Closer ‘Decomposing The Pustilent Void’ brims with a sluggish menace and employs some odd and eerie subtleties in its working melody.

This is 35 minutes of squalid, stilted death-doom that drags you down and leaves no trace of your soggy corpse.

Neil Arnold

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