Minnesota death-doom titans Void Rot prepare the release of their immense debut LP “Descending Pillars”, hitting the streets and airwaves officially tomorrow September 11 2020 via Everlasting Spew Records in Europe (vinyl and CD for europe HERE, digital for Europe HERE) and Sentient Ruin in North America (vinyl, tape, digital for America HERE), and today we’re honored to bring you the first full play of the album via the player below.
Void Rot had already made a name for themselves in 2018 via the release of their debut EP “Consumed by Oblivion”, a death-doom masterclass that drew comparisons to other heavyweights in the genre like Krypts and Spectral Voice thanks to its exceptionally atmospheric and massive sounding slow-moving death metal. Invitations to play the Total Death Over Mexico fest and then Killtown Deathfest (later cancelled due to COVID) seemed to cement this suspicion in most of us that we were dealing with a band with a bright future ahead, on an vertically ascending trajectory, and ready to take over the realm of atmospheric death metal by storm. Well, the wait is over, and as soon as the first riffs of “Descending Pillars” resound in your ear, you will be instantly reminded of this band’s power, of this album’s immensity, and transported to another dimension where death metal is the core element to a lucid hallucination, used as a world-building material to construct realms of the unthinkable and ungraspable….
By all definitions IMMENSE, “Descending Pillars” is an album of imposing proportions, with multiple buildups, collapses, and climaxes littered throughout. An album in which every moment is tense and building and moving toward some kind of catastrophic conclusion, only to reignite on the heels of its inexhaustible fire to reshape the listener’s fall deeper into a formless and hallucinogenic dimension of total and crushing aural immensity.
Using simple but exceptionally executed concepts extrapolated from a long running history of mid-tempo death metal, Void Rot have distilled the absolute best from the genre to create their own personal atmospheric slow death metal colossus, funneling the irresistibly catchy breakneck palm-mutes and power-chords, the soaring double-bass propulsion, and the enigmatic atmospheric interludes pioneered 30 years ago by Disembowelment, into a contemporary death-doom masterclass. Far from ending there, the experience is ulteriorly augmented and taken to extremes of utter excellence by the near flawlessness of each single riff, the exceptional deep and bellowing low-pitched vocals, and just its staggering ease of fruition, for an album that at just forty minutes in length, never loses focus for a second and accomplishes the unthinkable leaving you begging for more at the end of the listen without a single part you wish you hand’t heard, but just wanting more of it.
The main aspect of the complete excellence of “Descending Pillars” lies in its immense familiarity and graspability, its extreme ease of fruition, and its loyal adherence to a few but highly unforgettable concepts of death doom masterfully transposed to the present, which the band has elaborated and executed to sheer perfection. You will not find any pretentious experimentalism or anything too ambitiously out of focus here; rather you will simply witness the immensity of how a modern and contemporary death-doom album should sound in 2020, with its roots firmly planted into the genre’s most revered tradition to re-evoke its ancestral glory, and it’s form perfectly reshaped and adapted to the present and future of the genre.
