The Dark Rites of Doom

The main appeal of The Dark Rites of Doom is its unique blend of doom metal, death metal and a far more punk-oriented thrash metal sound. While playing all of these styles simultaneously, the result is a refreshing experience that is experimental and musically proficient while also being extremely gritty and morbid in its sound. For the most part, the music on here is formulaic, with short songs that revolve around one or two riffs. This adds to the cold sound of the record and makes it sound like something of a hybrid between early Celtic Frost and Autopsy, with mean and heavily distorted groovy riffs and a showcase of blunt force still with plenty of substance.

This brings me to my favourite part of the album; the guitar tone.It massively improves the rather simplistic riffs here, with a vicious high-treble edge that makes songs like Empire of Evil exceedingly heavy and dark. This tone gives the album an old-school sound which fits the filthy style of death/doom. The bass is also a prominent feature, and while it mimicks the guitars, it gives the slower parts a lot of needed boost in the low-end, emphasising the heaviness even further.

However, sometimes Acid Void picks up the pace with more thrashy parts such as the punkish display of power chords during Perpetual Death, a track which sounds like it belongs on In The Sign of Evil. On the other hand, this record suffers from a lack of deviation between each song, with the majority of the demo running together and not sounding different dynamically or structurally. Because of this, I feel like the music loses a potentially open and distinctive sound. For a demo that combines three genres and does it well, the actual process behind the songwriting contradicts this by sounding to formulaic.