I’m always surprised by what a hotbed for underground metal Denver, Colorado is. As a casual visitor, it’s such a clean, outdoors-oriented kind of place. It’s a place you go on your way to a mountain ski resort or to watch your sports team beat one of theirs. But beneath the clear Rocky Mountain air, the craft breweries, and the cannabis boutiques, something grimy stirs, belching forth established and ascendant underground darlings like Blood Incantation, Khemmis, Primitive Man, and Wayfarer. Meanwhile, bands like Doldrum come out of seemingly nowhere with records that land in my year-end top five.1 Denver death metal-ers Glacial Tomb have been plying their trade in the Mile High City since 2016. Their eponymous debut didn’t leave much of an impression around here,2 Will we see the light in sophomore follow-up Lightless Expanse?
Glacial Tomb’s brand of death on Lightless Expanse is brutal, somewhat blackened, sludgy, and sometimes toes the line just this side of tech death. The black comes mostly from vocalist Ben Hutcherson’s delivery, which falls into the now-standard contemporary death metal trope of half brontosaurus rumbles, half pterodactyl shrieks, but tremolo riffs also crop up, as on “Worldsflesh.” The sludge comes through in the viscosity of guitar tone built between Hutcherson and bassist David Small (both also of Khemmis), but there are also times, such as the midsection of “Voidwomb” and late in “Abyssal Host” when the band will drop their more technical death metal chops to fully embrace sludge metal structures. Songs like the excellent “Enshrined in Concrete” lean so hard this way they end up in beatdown hardcore territory. Lightless Expanse will at times call to mind Carnosus (“Stygian Abattoir,” “Seraphic Mutilation”), at others Warcrab (“Abyssal Host”), but ultimately they bring their own flavor to the ever-branching death-metal-plus genre.
Lightless Expanse by GLACIAL TOMB
Lightless Expanse is a record that gets better the more you marinate in it. That doesn’t mean it lacks immediacy. The surefire gym playlist addition “Enshrined in Concrete” struck me hard on first listen and has quickly climbed up my favorite songs of 2024 list. Meanwhile, opener “Stygian Abattoir” had to grow on me. Not because it’s a bad song, but because the three that follow it are so good that it’s hard to imagine making that the intro to the album. This is an album with two huge peaks surrounded by thankfully shallow valleys. The first peak, from the stomping “Voidwomb” to the deceptively melodic “Abyssal Host,” is tall enough to be littered with the corpses of those arrogant enough to attempt the summit. It’s a world-beating three-song stretch of brutality and tasteful songwriting. The second peak runs from the majestic “Seraphic Mutilation” to “Worldsflesh,” a song built for headbanging sure to get necks wrecked when played live, to “Wound of Existence.”
I mentioned above that opener “Stygian Abattoir” had to grow on me a bit, and the same can be said for the closing title track. It’s less immediate than the considerable high points elsewhere on Lightless Expanse, but Glacial Tomb were ultimately smart putting it last because it ends on a soaring guitar solo and breakdown that could have been the album’s pinnacle if sequenced in the middle. Instead, it closes the proceedings in a way that leaves you wanting more and helps you realize that the last 36 minutes have been spent in a very agreeable manner. If there’s one song that doesn’t quite live up to the standards set around it, it’s the album midpoint “Sanctuary,” but even that contains a memorable bass solo, and when played in sequence barely registers as a speed bump in an otherwise hard charging record.
I haven’t gone back to listen to Glacial Tomb’s debut, so I’ll trust Dr. Wvrm‘s assessment that it had its issues with integrating multiple genres and with songwriting. Whatever those might have been, I’d say they’ve thoroughly come out in the wash on their follow-up. This is a gem of brutality that I’ll be revisiting frequently, and another win for the Denver metal scene.
Rating: 4.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Prosthetic Records
Websites: glacialtomb.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/glacialtomb
Releases Worldwide: September 20th, 2024
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