Four years have elapsed since this Australian doom/death quintet released their debut EP, Dusk | Subside.
The only downside of that stellar release was its 22-minute runtime. This long-awaited full-length is barely 40 minutes long itself, but it’s a deeply compelling experience, packed with memorable twists and turns, like the blissful, heroic lead arpeggio between the blastbeats of rugged opener Distance Collapsed (In Rubble), and eerie threads of guitar ominously resounding like the tolling bell of an underwater church.
Guitarist Matthew Skarajew and drummer Paul Mazziotta were pioneering this sort of ultra-heavy, leftfield disorientation 25 years ago with Disembowelment, so when Distance | Collapsed lurches from haunting passages of offbeat melancholy, via hazy stretches of nightmare ambience, through furious blasts of dank-stinking caveman death metal, it’s with a quarter-century of compositional expertise and ingenuity, elevating them head and shoulders above the scene they helped create.
