ALBUM REVIEW: The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers – Cosmic Putrefaction
With the internet opening up access to all corners of the world, its easier than ever to stumble upon hidden brilliance buried deep, deep underground. Enter Italian maestro Gabriele “G.G.” Gramagli, and his death metal project COSMIC PUTREFACTION. Releasing his debut last year, the brutal At the Threshold of the Greatest Chasm, COSMIC PUTREFACTION serves as a vessel for highly dissonant, utterly chaotic old-school death metal – though more in line with the sonic horror of INCANTATION or BLOOD INCANTATION than the groovy sensibilities of OBITUARY or NECROT. G.G. is wasting absolutely no time and is back with The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers – does this record have the potential to put the Italian brutaliser on the map?
The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers explodes to life with an intensity not yet seen thus far in 2020. Between Awe and Fear upon the Burst of the Ominous Star opens the record as it means to go on, with little fanfare, only subtle flourishes of melody to keep things memorable and dissonance in spades. It’s immediately clear that COSMIC PUTREFACTION isn’t a project for messing about – right from the offset, G.G. delivers riff after riff, demonic growl after growl, and chaotic drum fill after chaotic drum fill, with little inclination to let up. This paints a telling picture of what’s to come from the rest of The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers.
This Landscape Sublimates Oblivion to Obliteration keeps the momentum flowing ever forward, its midsection burst of atmosphere-building a welcome reprieve before G.G. rounds off the track with atonal brutality, while The Glooming Murk of His Telluric Shrieks makes splendid use of its slightly longer run time to expand the vortex of sonic horror that makes COSMIC PUTREFACTION such an essential underground listen. There’s nothing here behind what G.G. has already established as the meat and potatoes of COSMIC PUTREFACTION‘s musical biology, but he makes incredible use of the additional space to double down on the dissonance and atmosphere.
Kicking off the second half of The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers, Abysmal Resonance Projection ramps up both the speed and the atmospheric tendencies of COSMIC PUTREFACTION‘s sonic pallet, transitioning seamlessly between brutal, classic death metal and something more horrifying, more damaging to the soul. It’s clear the extended run time, which pushes passed the eight minute mark, greatly benefits G.G., giving him the space to fully brutalise the listener with cosmic horror in the sonic form – something that was only teased at on At the Threshold of the Greatest Chasm, while comfortably achieved time and time again across the entirety of The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers.
Abysmal Resonance Projection ends abruptly, atonal chimes ringing into The Arcane Soothsayer Carefully Sculpted His Demise, the first of The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers‘s crushing closing one-two punch. By now, if you haven’t figured out at least a rough idea of what kind of musical cinder-block COSMIC PUTREFACTION is going to drop, there’s not much that can help you. Flurries of dissonant riffs fly through the track, while the use of higher pitched, blackened shrieks add a new level of brutality before soft piano chords lead into closer – and one of the record’s strongest moments – Utterance of the Fall of Man. Here, G.G. closes out The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers with its most atmospheric and cinematic piece. The full weight of the record gouges through the sanity of the listener as G.G. delivers, arguably, COSMIC PUTREFACTION‘s strongest track to date with an intense brutality that must be heard to understand the level of mind-bending intensity on display.
What is most impressive about COSMIC PUTREFACTION is the fact that even now, years into the old-school death metal revival, G.G. has created a project that still brings something new, fresh and exciting to the table. A musical exploration of cosmic annihilation, The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers brings artistry in abundance, coming as one of the most intensely enjoyable death metal albums of 2020s underground.
Rating: 9/10
The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers is out now via I, Voidhanger Records.
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