Cosmic Cult

To be frank, Dig Me No Grave could have easily phoned this one in, and marked few would have been the wiser on the receiving end. Launching from a familial platform leaning heavily on timeworn formulae traditionally tempered by genre masters like Immolation and Morbid Angel, Cosmic Cult exemplifies one of the rare instances wherein I have to applaud the choice of cover art, as it speaks a great deal to death metal minds well-versed, laying adrift obvious hails to nebulous affairs, most glaringly: Gateways to Annihilation. Cosmic Cult makes its interstellar home somewhere between Morbid Angel's well-respected yet often overlooked 2000 opus and speedier fare like the debut. Note that this immediately invalidates the band's two most controversial records (one of which I am quite fond of myself) - but this is discourse for another day.

The universal rationalization here is that love of lava can only get you so far, and while it is exciting to see throwback death metal of this caliber even attempted in this day and age, I can't recommend Dig Me No Grave on these hallmarks alone. Refreshingly, a real spine-compressing template of a riff set awaits listeners who dare traverse within the swarming, invasive multi-appendaged "Through the Gates" and "People of the Pit," both of which seemingly function on multiple wavelengths concurrently - gaining coherency just long enough to rollick through the verses, only to return to fretboard-razing thereafter. Pyatakov and Smirnov deliver just enough warped, twisted leadwork to underpin the occult atmosphere, and then quickly segue back into the lumbering appeal of the rhythm's sonic narrative.

Add to this an organic and honest percussive torrent courtesy of Schenikov, and the end results is definitely a fucking barnburner. For a death metal drummer he is actually notably restrained in the velocity category, instead opting for the faster thrash pattern augmented by the occasional blast. The blasts themselves are slow and lurching, almost certainly a conscious decision made to amplify the implosive atmosphere of the unconventional riffing intervals. Once the scattershot drum performance is joined with the bobbing and weaving of the guitars, vocals are a clear afterthought. As such, one has to give Rumyantsev some credit for manning this ship with something at least seemingly approaching authority. His moon-baked grunts are controlled, yet caustic at the same time, yielding little bloodshed.

Cosmic Chaos definitely has the style it wishes to purport down, and whether or not the listener can truly appreciate this depends on one's view regarding up-and-coming acts like this. To me, there is nothing wrong with shamelessly lampooning a style, so long as there is at least some iota of personality injected into the entire ordeal, and that the framework is worth adopting in the first place! This sort of boxes in acts like Dig Me No Grave, who will naturally find themselves eternally living in the proverbial (and literal) shadows of greater entities. Still, there is light years' worth of mileage to be extracted from Cosmic Chaos if one is in the need for sweeping, nebulous death metal with a pinch of Florida sand. Killer, for what it is.