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THORN
Crawling Worship

Life After Death / Gurgling Gore (2021)
Rating: 8/10

There are several bands which go by the moniker Thorn, but none of them will have the effect on you like this one-man band of death / doom horror.

Formed only a year ago, cult leader and lone ranger Brennen Westermeyer (also the frontman of Fluids) hails from Phoenix, Arizona, but his musical concoctions suggest he’s spent the last year wading through the slime pits of the River Styx.

For 26 minutes this debut full-length release grasps you in its cold tentacles and drags you into its own chamber of horrors, a place of black, slimed walls which bestow upon us tracks such as ‘Abyssal Shroud’, ‘Phosphorescent Glow’, ‘Maw Of Eternity’ and ‘Vexed By Archaic Smoke’. And let’s face it, we’ve all been vexed by a bit of archaic smoke over our time. But if you haven’t, then prepare to inhale the fumes of Thorn and this wretched, sludge-fest of a record.

The gnashing ‘Behemoth Awakened’ churns after the atmospheric introduction that is ‘Prologue: The Pentagram’. Vocally, what you get is the sort of lung-busting bile-coated bellows you’d expect from the rotten, undead rising. Musically, although very much macabre, it’s not as boggy or mushy as the latest Cerebral Rot album (Excretion Of Mortality), but the riffs grind relentlessly to enable that cold, crypt air to escape amidst the flurries of melancholic soloing, and that’s where the doomy nature comes to the fore.

Rarely fast, Thorn, whose moniker almost seems unfitting of such a sludgy, dank noise, remains consistently putrid bringing to mind the bludgeoning rushes of Immolation; thick globules of suffocating death metal which bring melody and mouldiness.

‘Maw Of Eternity’ feels cold, remote and esoteric in its unravelling extremity, the down-tuned chords trickle with suspense and menace before the lumbering, almost soulless clanks consume, while ‘Spiritual Sacrifice’ – a big favourite of mind – is mournful, sombre and crushing in its drive of disease, with each instrument leaking fetid air from its pores to the point of suffocation.

If you ever get trapped in some dusty vault then Crawling Worship must surely be your soundtrack as you pray for light. The deep, churning riffs, the grinding, severing percussion and the meaty, clanking bass are poisonous to the ears, as the title track oozes its fat, scabby arse from its led coffin and begins its sorry descent into further catacombs of consuming gloom.

‘Drowned Serpents’ hammers hard; a blizzard of baking frost with a lead that swirls with dissonance in awe to a cosmic god. The vocals are dehydrated bellows of clotted phlegm, and as with ‘Vexed By Archaic Smoke’ a lumbering, macabre trudging of grinding machinery forged by the dead.

‘Abyssal Shroud’, however, is a different beast. The initial blast suggests a fast-paced track, but again there’s that plodding arrogance propelled by the machine-gun fire of the percussion, while vocally it’s as if Gollum from Lord Of The Rings has been drafted in for extra squawks.

It’s hard to believe that the album is so short, but as ‘Phosphorescent Glow’ hammers for one last time one cannot help but become one with its frothing waves of ice and blood.

Crawling Worship opens like some endless, bottomless tomb into which we fall at its mercy as meat for the cosmic void.

Neil Arnold

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