ninehertz

São Paulo’s Fossilization launched themselves to the top tier of death-doom with their debut He Whose Name Was Long Forgotten, an album that still gets common rotation on my stereo. Despite equally lavish praise on their follow up Leprous Daylight, it never really clicked with me. Their third album, out on the evergreen Everlasting Spew Records, therefore is approached with interest and hope.

Advent of Wounds returns them to the highest of regards I placed them in after their debut. They state a desire to bring in influences from the likes of Anathema, Paradise Lost and early Katatonia into their death metal and there are obvious lines drawn to the likes of Dead Congregation in the approach.

From the beginning they unleash hellish death-doom from another dimension, peeling off decaying riffs magnificently, rumbling along like an earthquake. They’re not afraid to mix up the pace so its not one long dirge – Disentombed and Reassembled by the Ages’s manic, death-grinding splurge leaves you breathless, before breaks into a glorious barraging riff, the slower ending a shimmering monster before returning to that deafening grind mania.

It is in the death-doom stodginess that they excel though and there’s plenty of it. Take the wild storm of rabid guitars on Terrestrial Mold, tempestuously whipped into a frenzy. Or the stop-start discordance of Scalded by His Sacred Halo and its mechanical churn that somehow still sounds completely organic in a putrid gloopy way, evolving into a wonderfully alive beast, it is death-doom grime given life.

Fossilization reclaim their crown, if they ever lost it, a band who understand the swampy, stodgy nature of the sound and create this monstrous sound in their churn.