Tomb Mold’s last record Planetary Clairvoyance garnered them plenty of (rightly earned) attention but The Enduring Spirit takes their slime covered brand of old school death metal to new heights. Their fourth album is littered with reams of prog metal nods; whole sections sound like they’ve been stripped from 70s and 80s prog rock concept albums. It’s something of a newer direction for Tomb Mold, as the band try to push every boundary, outwardly expanding like a fusion reactor caught in thermal runoff, consuming influences from jazz to prog rock and everything in between to create a labyrinthine yet highly focused piece of death metal that would stand up to anything released in the last few years. No wonder it took them four years to write it.
Whilst the band teased a more progressive direction with their tape release Aperture of Body last year, they hadn’t leapt into the swirling void of Lovecraftian imagery and mind bending song writing that The Enduring Spirit fully realises. The guitar work has stepped up noticeably since their last release, no doubt helped along by Vella’s time with frontier pushing doom band Dream Unending and Power’s dreampop side project Daydream Plus. It’s always a pleasure when the drummer is also the vocalist in the band, and whilst Klebanoff blasts out the vocals with the weight of a granite monolith he manages to stay interesting and technical with the drums, so that it never really just becomes a time keeping exercise. It’s another instrument that adds to the overall effectiveness of the tracks, especially in the proggier sections where his drumming is let loose and allowed to flourish alongside the rich lead tones and teasing chord progressions.
“The drums are heavy and fast, the guitar riffs feel like they have angles derived from non-Euclidian geometry, and the bass is thick and hefty drenching the bottom end in a well-articulated slime that’s worthy of any cavernous death doom track.”
Angelic Fabrications is the standout track on the album; blissfully short at 3:30, making it the shortest track on the album, although for the old school metalheads it might well have the most impact. The drums are heavy and fast, the guitar riffs feel like they have angles derived from non-Euclidian geometry, and the bass is thick and hefty drenching the bottom end in a well-articulated slime that’s worthy of any cavernous death doom track.
Fate’s Tangled Thread is written as if the band have committed some sort of ritual necromancy and resurrected Chuck Schuldiner just to aid them in destroying ear drums with some of the most well realised death metal that’s been released in the last few years. Klebanoff’s pounding vocal delivery and huge drum sound drives the track from strength to strength, and although this probably sounds like the most typically Tomb Mold track on the album, it still manages to through you a curveball with a cleaner section in the middle of the song. As the vocals growl out the line, “experience both it’s calm and storm,” the song closes out to an increasing cacophony of off tempo blast beats and dissonant melodies, as well as yet another virtuoso guitar solo, whose tone can only be described as both beautiful and cataclysmic in its execution.
The crowning jewel of the album is The Enduring Spirit of Calamity which shows just how much work has gone into the writing of The Enduring Spirit. Influences abound on this track, blooming from their progressive death metal. There’s choppy speed you’d expect from Nile, hugely well produced riffs that can be likened to Slugdge, and clean sections that would be right at home on the lush plains of a Scale the Summit album. The song is 11 and a half minutes long, and there isn’t a wasted second in there. Sometimes long tracks can fall foul to the middle sections getting lost, possibly diminished by the importance of the opening and closing sections, however Tomb Mold manage to create a balance across the track as a whole so that the listener is never left wanting more, always satiated, right up until the distortion slides back to the forefront and the band take us on the final bit of the journey through the album, replete with groovy bass flourishes and a typical Tomb Mold riff, staccato, grimy and doom ridden all at once.
For a band to take such a huge leap forward in both their musicianship, song writing, and realisation of concept is an achievement, and what Tomb Mold have produced here is a death metal album for the ages. The Enduring Spirit combines effortlessly listenable old school vibes with boundary smashing prog sections that you could probably put on an album all by themselves and have them stand up on their own. The Enduring Spirit is what can only be described as a triumph, and you can’t help but think (and hope) Tomb Mold are going to continue caressing and blasting our ear drums with this sort of mind bending death metal for years to come.