Upon hearing ‘Decrepit Flesh Relic’, the first album from Civerous, one was left with a feeling of intense suffocating weight and agonal prostration in the service of bone-breaking death hymns. With the towering new album, ‘Maze Envy’, LA’s most creatively destructive Death / Doom ensemble let loose a freshly evolved but no less brutal conflagration of immersive horror and morbid lamentation.

Where Death / Doom may often stay in safe and unadventerous realms of narrow focus, Maze Envy’ presents a more far-reaching breadth of ambition, where unusual technicality, progressive atmospheres, string flourishes and chaotic mysticism radiate a purple light of the soul’s ascension from the black oceans of dread Civerous inhabit. Chain-dragging dirge, blackened blasting, and the savage ferocity of Lord Foul’s hellish vocal exorcisms exalt ‘Mazy Envy’ with a hellish grandeur within its myriad paths to oblivion.

With a massively crushing sound, ‘Maze Envy’ is end times music for an age in which that reckoning feels unfathomably close. Civerous batter the senses into a state of labyrinthian turmoil from which emergence is ever more implausible.

Yes, looking forward to this. Also on 20 Buck Spin, similar but not quite same, new Slimelord on March 8th.