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On their sophomore album, Preserved in Torment, Olympia WA’s doomed death metal unit MORTIFERUM push their penchant for dark, depraved, and disgusting dirges even further out into the periphery. Picking up where they left off with their Profound Lore debut Disgorged from Psychotic Depths, MORTIFERUM continue to mine the poisonous quagmire of classic American death metal, the warped visions of Finnish death metal, and the suffocating lurch of funeral doom for inspiration, but the resulting six tracks on Preserved in Torment operate on a larger scale, both in musical scope and in sheer crushing weight.
Preserved in Torment finds MORTIFERUM expanding on the ominous atmospherics of their past work while simultaneously pushing and refining their work into even more vile and oppressive sonic territories. From the moment the album opens with “Eternal Procession,” the listener is laid to waste with the band’s monolithic siege, with impossibly heavy riffs and relentless mid-tempo drum barrages creating the aural equivalent of being trampled beneath the hooves of some unstoppable army. MORTIFERUM don’t shy away from long-form songwriting on Preserved in Torment, yet the band doesn’t waste a note in crafting their epic assaults. The eight-minute opus “Incubus of Bloodstained Visions” harnesses all of the band’s cataclysmic impulses even as they display an increased capacity for wretched harmonies, dynamic tempo shifts, and nimble fretwork, resulting in a composition that taps into prog rock ambitions without succumbing to the clinical perfectionism of progressive death metal virtuosos. They reassert their integrated devotion to both putrid riffs and foul melodicism on “Caudex of Flesh,” where troglodyte death metal impulses merge with the chasmic doom of classic Cathedral.
On their sophomore album, Preserved in Torment, Olympia WA’s doomed death metal unit MORTIFERUM push their penchant for dark, depraved, and disgusting dirges even further out into the periphery. Picking up where they left off with their Profound Lore debut Disgorged from Psychotic Depths, MORTIFERUM continue to mine the poisonous quagmire of classic American death metal, the warped visions of Finnish death metal, and the suffocating lurch of funeral doom for inspiration, but the resulting six tracks on Preserved in Torment operate on a larger scale, both in musical scope and in sheer crushing weight.
Preserved in Torment finds MORTIFERUM expanding on the ominous atmospherics of their past work while simultaneously pushing and refining their work into even more vile and oppressive sonic territories. From the moment the album opens with “Eternal Procession,” the listener is laid to waste with the band’s monolithic siege, with impossibly heavy riffs and relentless mid-tempo drum barrages creating the aural equivalent of being trampled beneath the hooves of some unstoppable army. MORTIFERUM don’t shy away from long-form songwriting on Preserved in Torment, yet the band doesn’t waste a note in crafting their epic assaults. The eight-minute opus “Incubus of Bloodstained Visions” harnesses all of the band’s cataclysmic impulses even as they display an increased capacity for wretched harmonies, dynamic tempo shifts, and nimble fretwork, resulting in a composition that taps into prog rock ambitions without succumbing to the clinical perfectionism of progressive death metal virtuosos. They reassert their integrated devotion to both putrid riffs and foul melodicism on “Caudex of Flesh,” where troglodyte death metal impulses merge with the chasmic doom of classic Cathedral.
