ALBUM REVIEW: Burial – Inner Gateways To The Slumbering Equilibrium At The Centre Of The Cosmos

Italian Death-Doom titans BURIAL return to follow their phenomenal demo tapes with a debut full album, hopefully of such high quality. Set for release via Everlasting Spew Records on October 29th.

Grisly riffs of doom-tinged HM-2 grinding guitars open with a bellowing vocal to set the dreary and morbid pace of the horrors ahead. Blending the crushing brutality of Swedish Death Metal with those eerier moments gives a glorious middle ground of sepulchral and spectral extremity that is equally haunting and fierce. Descending into a murky mix, we have those cutting guitars with a killer array of more pounding drums to deliver a devastating instrumental backdrop to the Lovecraftian vocal incantations, certainly a blend fitting to such a wonderfully charnel aesthetic and sound. The emphasis on the Doom Metal side of things thankfully hasn’t been discarded, while this remains a Death Metal album, there is so much sombre and funereal beauty to the music that retains a certain ferocity while having more than one asset to their sonic assault.

Taking charge of their own direction, the band know when to inject a gadarene aggression into their sound a forge into the abyss with a less subtle but equally effective approach. The thing I have always found attracted me to Burial was their blend of 2 of my personal favourite veins of Death Metal (Swedish and Death-Doom), which they concoct something of their own from. Roaring, buzzing riffs and monolithic drums intertwine like some tendrilled monstrosity while the booming vocals do not divert from the course of evil, providing an equally dark and gruesome performance. The lengthy tracks do not feel like a chore to sit through, opening opening with 8 and 10 minute pieces, going on for a 5 and 6 minute a piece core before finishing with almost 14 minutes of eldritch Death-Doom. This is not a typical way to lay out a Death Metal record but it does work wonderfully for this particular piece which builds atmospherics, drops out into the infinity of the cosmos and then rushes headlong into the unknown before allowing the expansive finale to devastate all.

Overall there is a consistently shadowy and disembodied atmosphere but also a huge diversity in the songwriting which lurches from those mournful and desolate expanses into ghastly yet bludgeoning savagery that is unrelentingly powerful. Such an incorporeal and yet visceral listen is to be praised when executed with such brilliance and while still regarding certain sonic values that should always be upheld in a genre as established and beloved as Death Metal. “Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.”, a quote from HP Lovecraft himself which interestingly I believe if you regard dull as a verb meaning to lessen or diminish (in this case referring to the more extreme elements of Death Metal), could easily be an apt description of Death-Doom. Conjecture aside, this way of looking at Lovecraftian themed music of this variety allows us to see how everything fits together beyond sound and aesthetic but with a complete thematic too. Gaze into the abyss and become enlightened.

Burial’s debut full-length offering of enchanting cosmic dread is an atmospheric yet traditionally fuelled opus of Death Metal magnificence that radiates with the power they harness from the old school while casting their tendrils into the further reaches of infinity.