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Since the crypt of Spectral Voice was first opened circa the miserable Winter MMXII, a lone full length, five rehearsal promos, multiple 7-inch split EPs, and one infamous demo have been released. The band’s death / doom has been slowly rotting across the USA and Europe for years, putrefying the road alongside allies such as Sempiternal Dusk, Undergang, Blood Incantation, Anatomia, Primitive Man, Superstition, Mortiferum, Demilich, Hyperdontia, Grave Miasma, Flowering Blade and Krypts. For the first time, all official non-album material is finally available in one place, in dedication towards all cultists and gloomy fanatics who have supported the Spectral Voice since the early years of these recordings. Their self-released record Necrotic Demos contained the original Necrotic Doom demo and all the tracks from the out-of-print split EPs. Dark Descent Records present this compact disc edition as a digipak with a bonus track—over forty minutes of primitive and raw slow rotting death doom.

Size M

Taglia M

size L

Gatefold embossed cover, black vinyl
 

Gatefold embossed cover, double black vinyl

“Hypnagogia” is an expression of doom metal artistry where the listener will bear witness how EVOKEN can create a new and even more daring expression with a monument that will be recognized as a landmark. This tends to happen regardless with every EVOKEN release, but “Hypnagogia” sees the band expand their musical dynamics even more through the meticulous care and discrimination of the band’s song writing process, “Hypnagogia” being a listening experience through a multitude of varying yet flourishing emotions. 

For their new album, bassist/vocalist Dylan Desmond and drummer/vocalist Jesse Shreibman exploded Bell Witch's bounds. Like 2017's lauded “Mirror Reaper”, “The Clandestine Gate” is a single 83-minute track -- a composition that pulses and breathes on a filmic timeframe. It constitutes the first chapter in a planned triptych of longform albums, collectively called “Future's Shadow.”

While traces of organ and synthesizer hovered over “Mirror Reaper” and Bell Witch's 2020 collaboration with Aerial Ruin, “Stygian Bough Volume 1”, “The Clandestine Gate” drew those instruments closer to the center of its compositions. The band reunited with their longtime producer Billy Anderson as they began negotiating these new compositional weights. On “The Clandestine Gate”, Bell Witch's twinned voices build off of the chantlike textures of previous records while steering toward more developed melodic lines, structured harmonies, and rhythmic death metal growls.

The immense gravity of a work like “The Clandestine Gate”, which features exclusive stunning cover art by Jordi Diaz Alama, allows ideas to simmer in a way that feels profoundly and somatically intuitive -- not just a philosophical exercise, but an embodied truth. By slowing down both their creative process and the tempo of the music itself, Bell Witch digs even deeper into their long-standing focus: the way life spills on inside its minuscule container, both eternal and fleeting, a chord that echoes without resolution.

Reissue 2024- "The Flenser is proud to unleash this new pressing of a classic moment in contemporary US doom history. Artwork by the band’s own Adrian Guerra (R.I.P.) presented with an updated layout and in a more sustainable package than the initial pressing."
 

Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift—a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.

Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks.

Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.

While Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, what the band depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

Recorded live 31.08.2024 at Obscure Selections Vol. 1, MeetFactory in Prague, Czech Republic.
Mixed and Mastered by Matti Kynsijärvi, Graphic Design: Kalle Pyyhtinen.

An amazing soundboard recording of their performance captured in Prague CZ.
A true testament to their live ritual power that conjures darkness from beyond human existence.