Review Summary: Old school death metal, painted by numbers.
Despite its tiny population, Scotland is renowned for being home to many artists with great importance to a plethora of genres including but not limited to hard rock, shoegaze, post-rock, indie pop/rock and electronic music. When considering death metal and its related sub/fusion genres, Scottish acts are both far thinner on the ground and much less known, the most prolific being bands such as Bleed from Within and Man Must Die. Fresh on Glasgow scene in 2021 with the release of EP
Septic Funeral, Coffin Mulch have been slowly making a name for themselves in the UK, embarking on small venue tours and even landing local support for Liverpudlian icon Carcass earlier this year. With
Spectral Intercession, the band shows some genuine capabilities in songwriting and a solid debut album which should please dedicated fans of OSDM.
Like
Septic Funeral,
Spectral Intercession is largely a mid-paced, old school death metal affair interspersed with occasional flurries of blast beats and pockets of slower, lumbering material that skirt around the boundaries of death-doom. Tremolo-picked chainsaw riffs and rough guttural vocals in the vein of early Bolt Thrower dominate the album and together with raw, organic production, results in a truly filthy soundscape. While this may be more than enough to satisfy some OSDM purists, the minimal level of deviation from this sound causes the album to grow prematurely stale due to a surplus of overly similar song structures and uninventive riffs . That said, there are some glimpses of diversity shown on “Gateway to the Unseen” which combines crushing doom and harmonising leads with tasty technical drumming in a range of tempos – sadly, this is one of very few moments where the drums deliver anything impressive. Closing track “Eternal Enslavement” is another example which concludes the record in death-doom fashion but with the inclusion of minor elements of tribal-style drumming, leaning vaguely into post-metal territory.
While the riffs of David McLellan are solid and played with conviction, they quickly become repetitive and as the unwaveringly homogenous chainsaw rips through your brain, the overall sound reaches the point of being overbearing. A disappointingly lacklustre performance from the drummer - offering little more than basic timekeeping - contributes significantly to the shortfall in variety, and overall, a lack of intriguing nuance from the basic death metal formula presents a problem for
Spectral Intercession. Saved by a short run time of thirty minutes, the Glaswegians have produced a competent debut, but one that sadly relies too much on a by-the-numbers approach and carries an insufficient degree of originality to make them stand out. A touch more nuance and artistic flair on future endeavours would pay dividends.
