GOLGOTHAN REMAINS (Aus) – ‘Adorned in Ruin’ TAPE

Australian dark death metal horde Golgothan Remains return with their cataclysmic sophomore LP “Adorned in Ruin”, a thirty-minute weapon of absolute oblivion forged by the force of pure darkness and chaos. This new full length offering sees the Sydney extreme metal cult heighten and elevate their own vision of a dark future-shaping death metal to its most devastating form yet, pushing the genre beyond a state of weaponized majesty and assembling an imposing and magnificent sonic beast shrouded in destruction and otherworldly atmospheres. The band’s staple onslaught of enveloping dissonance and unyielding intensity indeed reaches the pinnacle of its expression on “Adorned in Ruin”, as various currents of black and death metal, old and new, are brought together by the band to create a transformative hellscape where futuristic and visionary atmospherics, sprawling songwriting and primeval violence are masterfully interwoven into omnipotent bedlam. Animating the imploding intensity and cascading chaos harbored at the heart of the album, one can easily parse the mind-bending guitar abstractions reminiscent of modern masters like Ulcerate, Abyssal or Phobocosm, yet the work resonates vigorously with the wrath and feral abandon that made Immolation’s or Deicide’s early dark death metal such a bastion of chaos and darkness decades ago. It is this encompassing yet future-reaching and visionary approach to the death metal craft, leveraging various of its eras, which has yielded such a majestic and imposing beast of an album. An intimidating dark death metal behemoth that emanates with an aura of apocalyptic immensity as it churns with the violence of godly destruction and feeds from the very depths of oblivion, casting monstrous shadows across a scorched wasteland and evoking visions of grandiose future wars and endless ruin devouring the earth.