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INVOCATION
Attunement To Death EP

Iron Bonehead Productions (2020)
Rating: 8.5/10

Don’t let the rather dull and unimaginative band name put you off, because the latest EP from this Chilean bunch of death metal hounds has left me gasping for air as if I’ve been stuffed in a dank coffin for several days. This is easily one of my favourite releases of the year so far; a damp, musty and abysmal heap of mould-coated gloominess.

Attunement To Death is the second EP to emerge from this band in the last couple of years, and is an outing that is sure to send its stifling spores across the universe as Invocation achieves its dreary grey march. This release runs for 30 minutes, and offers up five tracks (plus a brief introduction) that drags you into its doomy depths and leaves you aching and creaking like an old warped coffin lid.

Invocation is a rather mysterious trio that has only been on the scene for five years, but with this oppressive and often mid-paced affair we experience a truly frightening combo that dwells all too frequently in its own reeking chasm of suffocating mists and thick air. This is cavernous death metal and not the most original, but because the atmosphere of this thing is so stifling and humid one can only marvel at its repugnant air; a foul, heaving rumble of low noise that emanates from depths that us humans can never truly understand.

Just how does such a morbid and morose cacophony come to be? Only the members of Invocation truly know as they conjure up utterly fusty and disgusting slabs of dense gloom with unorthodox titles such as ‘Flying Ointments’ and ‘The Officiants’. And when pace is applied, such as with ‘The First Mirror’, one gets the feeling of being blasted by a damp wind of torment inside some smelly catacomb; the guitars rushing like a horrid draught of repulsion as the phlegmed vocal sneers form as a remote echo of horror.

Opening cut ‘Flying Ointments’ has a nauseous rattle as the drums clank like rusty old bells battered by howling winds. But when these guys slow things down that’s where their true primitive power shines, albeit so dim in the fading light, because these guys really do know how to create macabre atmospherics as the percussion races then thuds lying a dying heartbeat, in tandem as the instruments create vile, sickening blasts of chilly speed akin to some monstrous manifestation flailing its soggy limbs within the confines of a sodden, aged well.

Throw this bunch in with the UK’s Grave Miasma and that sort of remote, archaic and above all sonorous ghoulishness. Closer ‘Secret Tongues’ barks with grim aplomb; instrumentation congealing like some sewer strewn faecal matter formed of thick, gloopy guitars and a bass that just rumbles like a distant wind.

Invocation’s sound is not a place I’d want to visit regularly for fear of being smothered by such putridness, but when in the mood for such primitive rumblings I can sure as Hell appreciate the unfathomable horrors of such a ghastly, echoing slice of misery. This is very much rank old school death metal that needs regular fumigation to stop it from forming into a fast network of fungoid terror.

Neil Arnold

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