Eryx

Gloria Morti occupy that highly-concentrated crossroads between black and death metal, ever so slightly accentuating the stomping verbosity of their death side, routinely siphoning an accretion of inky dissonance via the blackened veneer that ever-so-tastefully coats Eryx, the band' s second of four (as of now) full-lengths. The swampier churns of Finnish death metal as I know it are hardly present here if at all. Gloria Morti sound more influenced from the modern Polish and Norwegian death metal scenes. I just hear a lot of Behemoth in here, with some monolithic, exotic note progressions and meager use of backing orchestration.

Eryx is certainly an elephantine sounding sliver of plastic, but production aside (for now) we can look past these ephemeral facets, a task easily accomplished when swept up in the swinging, dissonant Demigod surge of "The Origins of Sin," along with the incessant blasting that permeates the record in its entirety. Gloria Morti are appreciably dissonant, and don't overuse tremolo riffing in an attempt to balance both extremes toyed with here. These guys aren't averse to the implementation of keyboards, but I was kind of hoping to see more of them. Parts of "The Djinnwhisperer," for example, sound like they are from God the Lux-era Vesania. Okay, that piano line is kind of amateurishly played but it is incorporated well and grinds with the harsher climes of the guitar with potency. The choral swaddling of "Sands of Hinnom" is another organic, corporeal symphonic deviation, offset by the main artillery (the incessant hellfire blasting).

As Eryx plays on, it digs its atmospheric fangs in deeper with ethnic instrumental offshoots like "Mesopotamia." Wow, what a great way to underpin the record's atmosphere while concurrently setting the stage for the chunky, coiled inhibition of closer "Dreadful Silence." Deficiencies exist in spots, mainly due to the band's particular riffing style, which introduces too many drop-out sections consisting of nothing more than straight blasting. This is by far the exception, however. Accelerated sequences are deftly woven in the more upper-mid tempo blackened death framework, and the verbose, taut guitar tone sets it all in stone, sounding anything but modern.

Eryx is competent black/death for fans of Zyklon, Myrkskog, Crionics, Behemoth - the list goes on and on. Standout tracks include all of those mentioned so far along with "Evermorose," which really locks into a hypnotic, mechanical groove and totally kills it. Overall, Gloria Mundi impressed me here, it's pseudo-exotic sounding death metal. Hardly an uncommon sight nowadays, but this album pulls it off better than most.