ALBUM REVIEW: Wormtales – Carnosus

What does The Godfather Part II, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, and Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom have in common? They’re all prequels that outshone their futuristic predecessors. If Wormtales, the third album from Swedish death-proggers CARNOSUS, was a movie, it’d easily join that pantheon.

Billed as a prequel to 2023’s Visions Of Infinihility – which itself was a prequel to 2020’s Dogma Of The Deceased -, Wormtales thematically continues the rise of the Withered One, a totalitarian dictator set on leaving the world in a state of deliberate Necrocracy – a world led by the dead in a vision of infinite nothingness.

Despite its bleakly dystopian concept, Wormtales colours its 10 tracks in different shades, like a director choosing different shots to convey specific meanings. Harbinger Of Woundism melds BLACK Dahlia MURDER’s melodeath with CARCASS’ deathgrind, Neglectikon blends the fuzzed-up groove metal of LAMB OF GOD with deathcore pig squeals and NWOBHM-solos, and Solace In Soil sparse surroundings leave you suffocating in a technical death-doom hinterland. 

Following Visions Of Infinihility’s independent release, Wormtales arrives via Willowtip Records. Much like watching the Star Wars prequels, the album makes a hyperspace-sized jump in quality. Opener Birthless’ crackling fire and burning paper fully immerses you into the world of the Withered One, bleeding seamlessly from track to track, like scene to scene, affording you the luxury of fully appreciating every Easter egg and lore reference burrowed away within each track.

Vocalist Jonatan Karasiak‘s schizophrenic delivery casts him as the ultimate unreliable narrator. Within Throat, Within Heart’s devastating death growls lead militia-sized blast-beats and chainsaw riffs as your body gives way to the worms, whilst Worm Charmer’s gutturals sink venom into its chugging groove like a snake to its victim, and Yearnings Of A Rotten Spine wallow like a blackened death metal banshee out for your blood, searching for the elixir of suffering within.

Like Christopher Nolan constructing Oppenheimer, CARNOSUS stitch Wormtales complex narrative together by bucking traditional song structures in order to truly tell the story. Discarding choruses altogether for the most part, tracks like Worm Charmer sacrifice memorable hooks in favour of progressing the story. It’s sinisterly effective, leaving entire passages engraved in your brain, just in case you need those one-and-done details for later, like the crucial “I crawled to never think, I crawled to forever sink in the hysteria beyond sanity’s brink, and through the crystalline time and light that I sought, blind with desires unfathomable, flowed a brew from which a swig I drew, to feel a solace I never knew”. 

Wormtales, like many prequels birthed after their source material, surpasses that which came before it. Much like Francis Ford Coppala did with The Godfather Part II in 1974, with Wormtales, CARNOSUS’ make their futuristic vision for technical death metal a reality.

Rating: 9/10

Wormtales is set for release on October 18th via Willowtip Records.

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