Worm - Foreverglade (2021)^{Release ID: 31797}

On my occasional forays into death/doom I often get bored if I am honest; certainly, in later years when it has been done to death (pun intended) and well-done death/doom seems a rarefied breed. As such, I approached Foreverglade with the kind of pensiveness reserved for opening Christmas presents from someone who usually just gives me cash.

Thankfully, Worm have managed to not only do real justice to the ethos of death/doom but have also added some unique elements that touch other points of the extreme metal spectrum also. In doing so they manage to make Foreverglade a success in terms of both design and content. It is at its very core a death/doom album still yet it has dashes of accessibility beyond just the fathomless repetition and smothering murk that coats everything.

For a start, this is one of the most sensible use of keys on a death/doom record I have ever heard. There is no sense of someone falling on the keys for dramatic effect when the atmosphere dictates we need to plunge down some dark(er) hole. Instead the gothic melodies they exude compliments the wider stratosphere, linking some catchy riffing with some excellent lead work or more melodious guitar work in general. It is the guitars that rule on this album as well, supported superbly by the thunderous drumming of L. Dusk and the ghastly and cavernous vocals of Fantomslaughter.

It is clear that these guys have come from a black metal background in their early years, and this is never more obvious in the vocal rasps that permeate the vast atmospherics that the more traditional death/doom sustains. What this does to the album is create a sense of cohesion of influence and styles across the forty-four-minute runtime; feeling like an album that encompasses the history of Worm as a unit whilst teasing us with more progressive tendencies here and there also. At times (Subaqueous Funeral) the album has an almost conceptual feel to it made more apparent by the maturity of the lead work and patient structure building that goes on.

For an album of such gargantuan heaviness it feels very short and concise and does not outstay its welcome by any means. Worm clearly have a lot to offer but are mature enough to restrain it in one of 2021’s more intriguing releases.

Since previous release, Gloomlord, the Floridian death doom duo have expanded into a trio by adding guitarist Nihilistic Manifesto to the lineup and beefing up their already impressively heavy ranks. For the recording of Foreverglade, they also brought in session drummer L. Dusk. Both new additions have had a positive effect on the band, the rhythm section feels more solid and has a greater depth to their foundations with L. Dusk's addition and NM certainly makes his presence known, especially with some atypical death doom soloing (check out the solo on Subaqueous Funeral) and a bit more of a gothic feel to the guitar sound.

The production sounds much better on this compared to Gloomlord too and I think the album benefits from a clearer sound without losing any of the filthiness that we have come to expect from the band. The riffs are super-downtuned, throbbing death doom chugs in the main that any fan of old-school death doom acts like Autopsy should be right at home with and the vocals have a bit of variety, utilising not only the usual deep growls derived from death metal, but also black metal shrieks which harks back to the band's earliest days when mainman Fantomslaughter ran the band as a black metal solo project.

The band have also developed their songwriting somewhat, with the centrepiece track being the eleven-minute epic Cloaked in Nightwinds which has several tonal shifts during it's runtime for a bit more of a progressive feel (it is still insanely heavy though) and Empire of the Necromancers strays into melodic black metal territory more than once and has a more airy atmosphere to it than the previous tracks, allowing a ray of light into this filth-strewn, foetid swamp. Closer, Centuries of Ooze, somehow combines ultra-heavy death doom with what sounds at times suspiciously like Wall of Voodoo's Mexican Radio for a strange but incredibly effective atmosphere.

So, on the evidence of this, Worm seem to have come on leaps and bounds in the twenty months since Gloomlord's release and if they continue to develop at this rate we will have a serious contender on our hands before long.