EXCARNATED ENTITY - Mass Grave Horizon CD

Released September 8, 2023.

Mass Grave Horizon paints a hopeless vision of the future, drearily dredging death metal's darkest depths and locating majestically miserable doom among those ominously bubbling landscapes. Following a two minute instrumental introduction, EXCARNATED ENTITY kick in with a classic downtuned death metal surge before gutting its underbelly, revealing the morose melodicism of earliest My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost. As the eight-song/44-minute album plays on, its attendant song titles vividly illustrate said vision - "Carcinogen Shroud," "Corridor of Flame," and "The Butcher's Pulpit" among them - and one can further detect shades of Trouble, Cathedral, Solitude Aeturnus, and even Lycia lurking within those ruins. It's a massively dense-yet-spacious sound, and the quartet's songwriting suitably incorporates slow twists of the knife, but always in a deliberate and linear fashion. And, come climactic closer "Gallery of Defeat," your fate is sealed and your soul spent...and EXCARNATED ENTITY stand stoic, unmoved and unmovable.