Two years after their four-song demo, the debut album from Spain’s Deathwomb has finally emerged from the underworld. Weighted by a sound that is murky, mysterious and brimming in 90’s bile, Moonless Night Sacraments is black, brutal and bludgeoning. While manic lead work cuts through the darkened atmospherics, the raging riffs and doom-laden density is spiked with a penetratingly grim vocal. The riffs grinding away in the lower registers, it’d be easy to call Deathwomb’s bile bestial, but there’s something sharper, something more mystical than the label affords.
While the dense diabolism of opener ‘Tablets of Fire’ and second track ‘Eternal Oaths of Chaos’ both tear a hole in the heavens with their sheer brutality, it’s with the haunting organ that opens the magnificent third track ‘The Primordial One’, the dragging coda of ‘The Ancient Serpent’ and the doom-heavy drag, synth-tinged title track that the band’s dark majesty rises to its full height. And so from ‘God’s Servant Laceration’ on, the shadow is cast long and deep, the band hammering harder into the blackened void for increasingly intense slabs of savagery. ‘Enochian Keys’ and ‘Black Omen’ (both reworked from the 2017 demo) are haunting, their menace bleeding into the ominous immensity of ‘Moloch’s Domain’ and album closer, ‘The Chasm’, featuring more of that magnificently morbid and unhinged lead work, something that the band could make more use of. But the band don’t need me to tell them what to do because Moonless Night Sacraments is nothing less than a blackened beauty.
Words by Jason Guest
- Released by Iron Bonehead on 19 April 2019
- Deathwomb on Bandcamp
- Iron Bonehead website
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Track list:
- Tablets of Fire
- Eternal Oaths of Chaos
- The Primordial One
- The Ancient Serpent
- Moonless Night Sacraments
- God’s Servant Laceration
- Enochian Keys
- Black Omen
- Moloch’s Domain
- The Chasm
