ALBUM REVIEW: Endless Wound – Black Curse

Since changing their name from MALIBLIS, Denver, Colorado’s BLACK CURSE have made quite a serious impression. Their debut demo provided the groundwork for some excellent music, with the three songs that featured on it showing a lot of promise. But when your band features members of PRIMITIVE MAN, BLOOD INCANTATION, KHEMMIS and SPECTRAL VOICE it’s hardly surprising that the band are able to craft such visceral and frenzied compositions. Their debut album, Endless Wound bears the same name as the aforementioned demo, but builds significantly upon the foundations that it set out, resulting in one of the best death metal records to see the light of day this year.

Charnel Rift bursts into life on a wave of juggernaut guitars, pummelling drums and feral vocals, punctuated by a crushing, sludgy bass line that gives this song a dense, monstrous sound. Crowned in (Floral) Vice proves to be an equally bellicose offering, with chaotic guitars and frenetic drumming creating a heady whirlwind of noise, and the vocals add a coarse, grating edge to the proceedings. Enraptured by Decay is a slower, more measured piece of music with a vast, monolithic feel. In spite of the still robust, and at points demented, musicianship, this song has a huge sound that is epic in a melancholic way.

Seared Eyes, by contrast, is a brief, yet unerringly brutal, aural assault, with extremely intense, bestial guitars and punishing percussive blasts, with a far eerier, more atmospheric vocal style replacing the savage gutturals that have been prominent in this album earlier outings. Lifeless Sanctum, another short, sharp shock of a song, opts for a more stripped back, primitive approach to the music, with thunderous drums and spartan guitars allowing for a much clearer, hypnotic sound, peppered with excellent experimentation with distortion, a feature that really helps to cement this track in the listeners mind, despite lasting less than three minutes.

Endless Wound is a steady, weighty piece of music with some great, expansive guitars and especially gnarly leads that give the guitars a deranged, disjointed feel at points. The vocals take a noticeable backseat, utilising the more measured, creepy delivery that made Seared Eyes such an impressive track. Finality I Behold, another sprawling, lengthy offering that makes a concerted effort to be this albums most varied and vitriolic number. Bringing in all the elements that have made this album so impressive, from the slower, doom-laden moments to the much more focused, aggressive ones, it’s an unrelenting, murky death metal cut that makes full use of its running time, ending the album on a fantastic and engrossing note.

One of the key things that turns Endless Wounds from a great record to an exemplary one is the excellent production on here, which gives the whole album a sepulchral, murky feel that adds to the claustrophobic, discordant sound of the record. If BLACK CURSE continue making music like this, they could very well be at the forefront of the underground death metal scene in a few years time.

Rating: 9/10

Endless Wounds is out now via Sepulchral Voice.