Bands can be derivative and still be good. I mean, with another old school worship band popping up what seems like every week there are actually quite a few who are really good at what they do. The best of those bands are the ones who realize that they are part of what is essentially a revival movement and wear their influences on their sleeves with pride and employ enough ingenuity to add something new into the tried and true formulas of the past greats.
Gorephilia are one of those bands. They derive their sound not from a singular band but the sound of an entire scene, the putrid early 90's Finnish death metal movement. I mean, it kind of makes sense because, well, they are Finnish, but what makes them stand out is that they are really ***ing good.
Ascend to Chaos harkens back to the glory days of the gloomy Finnish scene with just the right amount of respect and creativity to make them one of the most interesting bands in this new wave of old school death metal.
The early Finnish bands were, in relation to their fellow Scandinavian and US counterparts, much more focused on the doom and gloom elements of death metal rather than the punk and thrash attitudes of many other regions.
Gorephilia know this, and as a result
Ascend to Chaos is a wonderful mixture of gloomy death and doomy riffs that harkens right back to the glory days of bands like
Convulse and
Demigod. The pacing switches frequently from mid tempo blasts to monstrous doom tinged riffs that crawl along through the filthy catacombs of each track. The production is thick and rotten but clear enough so that pretty much everything that’s going on can be heard quite easily. It's that nice organic sound that makes death metal sound so good.
There's the obligatory eerie intro track and interlude but they don't in any way detract from the music (the title track is actually pretty cool and a nice way to build into the 8 minute closer Tower of Bones). The vocals are actually one of the best parts of
Ascend to Chaos. They're not quite in
Demilich territory, but these inhumanly low gutturals are one of the best I've heard in quite some time. It’s like listening to a man puke up his own entrails and then recording the results, which are ***ing great. Essentially
Ascend to Chaos is an extremely promising EP from one of the better throwback bands currently pumping out new material. If you like thick, putrid, nasty death metal in the vein of the champions of the early Finnish scene this *** is for you. Look out for a full length too because I guarantee that *** will rule.
