AN NCS PREMIERE: DORMANT INFERNO — “DELIVERANCE”

Although the vast Indian subcontinent has its fair share of notable metal bands from across the musical spectrum, melodic death/doom isn’t a genre that first springs to mind when thinking about Indian metal. In that sense, Dormant Inferno from Mumbai are something of an outlier — but they clearly knew what they doing when they released their notable debut EP in 2011, entitled In Sanity.

Today we’re premiering one of the new Dormant Inferno tracks that will appear in early April via the Transcending Obscurity India label on a split release with Pakistan’s Dionysus. As good as In Sanity was, the new song reveals a band who have become even more self-assured and powerful. The name of the new split is Beyond Forgotten Shores, and the track we’re bringing you is “Deliverance”.

The song is an 11-minute epic that joins together titanic, doom-drenched riffs, currents of exotic, compelling melody, and passages of crippling, accelerated assault. After an extended opening segment that establishes the song’s main motifs, with harsh vocals that are absolutely gargantuan, the volume subsides, giving way to a slow instrumental mid-section driven by reverberating chords and laced with a mix of whispers and jagged spoken words. That section also includes a serpentine Eastern melody that enhances the sorrowful, spell-binding nature of the atmosphere.

As the volume grows and those massive riffs return, the mesmerizing melody continues to infiltrate the mind, paving the way for a potent ending that jabs and pounds. Well after the song ends, the music’s sounds will still exert a tight grip on your memory.

“Deliverance” is a compelling piece of song-craft — intelligently written, beautifully performed, and powerfully produced — that should prove tremendously appealing to fans of melodic death/doom wherever they are located.

“Deliverance” is one of three songs by Dormant Inferno on Beyond Forgotten Shores (along with two by Dionysus), one of which is a cover of Incantation’s “A Once Holy Throne”. The split is scheduled for release by Transcending Obscurity India on April 7, with painted cover art by the label’s owner Kunal Choksi, and it will be available for order at the links below.

You can find Dormant Inferno on Facebook here, and their debut EP In Sanity — which I strongly recommend — is on Bandcamp at this location.

https://transcendingobscurityindia.bandcamp.com/album/beyond-forgotten-shores
http://www.transcendingobscurity.com/
http://transcendingobscurity.bandcamp.com/