Review by Sonny for Temple Nightside - The Hecatomb (2016)

Temple Nightside are a new one on me, but I could tell from the off that this was going to be right up my street. I have made no secret of my love for old-school cavernous death and death doom metal and that is what these guys provide in spades. They seem to have gone all-in on the cavernous atmosphere, looking to funeral doom for inspiration in layering the primordial ooze over their sound. This is so funereal in atmosphere that it sounds like it is being performed by a band who have been buried alive and is seeping up through the earth into the ears of the listener. Drummer Basilysk is a member of reasonably well-known funeral doom band The Slow Death and guitarist/vocalist IV was the sole member of blackened funeral doom project Funeral Mourning, so these guys have an understanding of funeral doom that serves exceedingly well their intention to make The Hecatomb as foetid-sounding as possible.

Taking their cues from OSDM giants like Autopsy, The Hecatomb combines classy death metal riffs (the opener Graven has an absolute killer of a main riff) with slow, ponderous doom to produce a multi-faceted attack on the listener's eardrums. Although this approach is almost as old as death metal itself, Temple Nightside manage to make The Hecatomb a must-listen by their sheer ability to craft exceptional death metal tunes which, when married with one of the most mouldering and pestilential production jobs ever, results in an album any self-respecting extreme metal fan should be clamouring to get their clammy, hook-clawed mitts onto.

While I do consider this to be one of the best cavernous death metal albums I have heard since Mental Funeral, great as the atmosphere works on the slower sections, I do have some reservations about it's effectiveness on the faster parts, with the muddiness of the production oh-so slightly blunting the onslaught of the death metal blasts to my ears. This, however, is nitpicking of the highest order and I am a bit embarrassed even to have brought it up so, fuck it, forget I mentioned it!