ALBUM REVIEW: Maze Envy – Civerous
Extreme music is in an increasingly healthy state across the globe in 2024 and a handful of underground labels continue to lead the way in pushing the envelope labelled ‘heavy metal’. One such label is 20 Buck Spin, a name that will no doubt be familiar to those music fans that have taken an interest in the new wave of old school death metal that has emerged over the last few years. With releases from the likes of WITCH VOMIT, DREAM UNENDING and TOMB MOLD, 20 Buck Spin has established itself at the forefront of a scene that continues to expand the boundaries of what extreme music can do. It seems natural, then, that they should be releasing Maze Envy, the second album from LA death-doom monsters CIVEROUS. Following on from 2021’s crushingly heavy full-length debut Decrepit Flesh Relic, Maze Envy promises to bring the band to the attention of a whole new wave of metal fans around the world.
As with their debut, the record opens with a short introductory piece which really sets the tone of what’s to come. Here, on The Azure Eye, a single violin pierces its way through your ear drums, building in volume and intensity before being joined by other strings in a discordant crescendo, atonal stabs jumping out as they build towards a brief and shocking moment of silence, before the grinding riff of second track Shrouded In Crystals hits. This string-focused intro brings to mind moments from horror classics like The Shining or The VVitch and the atmosphere created very much matches the impending sense of dread created by the best bits of those movies – which is appropriate, given what follows.
Shrouded In Crystals, however, is where it all properly kicks off. The tone generated by the dual guitars of Daniel Salinas and Alonso Santana is truly disgusting; the opening riffs swathed in a grimy, crunching sound that still manages to cut through the mix with immense impact. Drummer Aidan Neuner and bassist Drew Horton then add a pummelling bottom end to the opening bars, slowly surging (if that’s possible) into a passage of bleakly satisfying death-doom, the paint-stripping gutturals of vocalist Lord Foul sitting sickly amongst it all.
At eight-and-a-half minutes, you’d be forgiven for expecting CIVEROUS to simply continue along these same lines for the rest of the song. However, a 20 Buck Spin release rarely does things by the book and the remainder of this track highlights the innovative, progressive approach that CIVEROUS take to their music. Punctuated with time signature shifts, blackened, blastbeat-laden sections and the occasional flourish of strings, this is heavy music that challenges the listener and confounds expectations at every move.
This album also showcases the talents of Andrew Solis of APPARITION at the mixing desk. Sometimes the bass drops, the drums shift over to a single speaker, only to open out into full stereo again as the rest of the band crashes back in, further heightening the impact of the colossal noise CIVEROUS spew forth. Among the darkness, though, there is still light. Endless Symmetry is a two minute interlude featuring shimmering, reverb-heavy picked guitars, allowing the band and listener the chance to take a breath before diving back down into the shadows.
Levitation Tomb begins with a nod to more traditional doom before stomping onwards into a hellish combination of blastbeats and a haunting piano-like melody. As the piece progresses, these seemingly disparate sounds coalesce into a crushing whole that sounds all the more fresh and exciting simply because of how experimental it is. That is not to say that this is the death-doom equivalent of full-on, YES-type prog though. The core of each of these songs is built on crunching riffs, hellish-sounding vocals and a rhythm section that grooves just as much as it shifts around, with a production that uses the dynamics of light and shade to showcase the band at its best.
The fact that CIVEROUS are able to create something that sounds so different to a lot of other bands in this genre is testament to their songwriting talent, musicianship and desire to embrace the future, unafraid to take their music in often completely unexpected directions. As if to prove this, album closer Geryon (The Plummet) is a symphony of heaviness in itself, encompassing everything that has come before it into ten minutes of astonishing beauty and brutality, leaving you breathless as its epic, mournful coda rings out across the underworld.
If you are a fan of brutally bleak music, whether death, doom, black metal or something in between, you must give this album a listen. Maze Envy is next level stuff and with it, CIVEROUS have raised the bar for extreme music in 2024.
Rating: 10/10
Maze Envy is set for release on March 22nd via 20 Buck Spin.
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