Review Summary: Sour milk from death metal’s bosom.
When it comes down to it, death metal has [sometimes] grasped too far within its own reach. The more feral mixing of sickly riffs and thundering drums brought forth from the depths of caverns everywhere has become hit and miss. I’ll explain: if you’re not Portal (and this is very much on the cusp of taking a clone of those Aussie stalwarts and recording it through an unreliable VCR unit), and your music isn’t inaccessibly accessible, you’ve missed the trick.
Basom Gryphos in itself isn’t offensively caustic, nor is the inherent stomp riff pacing of the album’s forty minute run-time shockingly detrimental to the genre it portrays. More simply, Pestilength’s sophomore is a lack-lustre, less-than-inspiring and on-directional release that simply re-hashes on a style made better by others. By simply throwing their death metal by numbers at the wall, the band themselves tread a path of monotony, relying on the occasional use of melody or ascending leads to pull the album’s sound into more
interesting discussions. Tracks like “Entglant” invoke massive quantities of low-end and dissonance, while a deeper cut, such as “Tephra Codex” meander, pushing loose ideas up a steep hill. These tracks simply don’t go anywhere—or in the very least, crawl with the irate pace of a tortoise.
That’s the crux of my judgement.
Basom Gryphos is so very far from being a great album, but it’s a lot closer to ticking the boxes of a good emulator of a very particular niche within the death metal genre. Largely, Pestilength’s sophomore is a loose basket of ideas, shaken and reassembled. I’m not inspired to listen to this again and yet, I’m yet to dissuade those who’d rather hold
Basom Gryphos’s plodding gait against warm bosom. After all, paps come in all shapes and sizes, maybe someone else will find these a safe place to call home.
