Although I thought for sure that we had passed along some comments about the Grievous Psychosis debut album from Poland’s Martyrdoom six years ago, alas, we didn’t, though we did share an interview by Comrade Aleks of guitarist Grzegorz Młynarczyk.
Ours was a regrettable oversight, because that first album was packed with grisly charms. It leaned into doom-soaked old school death metal, with plenty of heaviness and hooks, revealing an evolution from the band’s earlier releases.
And yet maybe it’s just as well, because the band’s forthcoming second album, As Torment Prevails, is even better. The songwriting is more capable and dynamic, the melodies more blood-congealing, the grooves even more bone-smashing, and the production is improved, though still dirty enough to suit the band’s old school devotions.
To back up these opinions, what we have for you today is the premiere of the new album’s fifth track, “Shedding of the Soul“.
“Shedding of the Soul” is a genuinely ghastly and gruesome piece of work, both diseased and supernatural, but it also grooves with lead-weighted heaviness. Creepy, corrosive, and doomed it is, but it gets muscles moving too.
On this new song Martydoom lead with a compelling riff, one that alternately hammers and writhes like those big tentacle on the album’s eye-catching cover art, and they back it with a low-end groove that also hammers damned hard.
The sound is dismal, and becomes even more dismal when the distorted chords are allowed to reverberate in moaning misery, and the lead guitar slowly quivers like mindless worms. Gargantuan gutturals and rabid screeches add their own horrors to this evolving horror show.
And evolve it does. Madness begins to bloom in the music as the guitars begin to blaze and eerily squirm, but the song’s jolting pace also slows. The music crawls like some massive thing, rotten to the core and oozing disgusting fluids. The jackhammering begins again, more slowly than before, and a guitar squirms again, like a mass of maggots busily feeding themselves on suppurating flesh.
At the end, the music’s supernatural aura flares, the corrosive guitars slowly writhing in tones that don’t sound earthly, as if a soul has indeed been shed, and now is lost.
We’re also sharing a stream of the new album’s first single, the wonderfully named “Katatonic Ascension of Cirrhosis“. Well, cirrhosis is a very human affliction, and the music does sound deeply sickened, but this song is even more monstrously supernatural than the one we’ve just premiered, especially when a wailing and warping solo surfaces near the end. It’s also a slow crusher of stupendous proportions.
On the other hand, with the big bass providing the first bridge, the song also shifts gears and begins to scamper and lumber like… well… an ebullient drunken beast. While pushing and pulling the momentum, it will also come as no surprise that Martyrdoom also pound like a massive pile-driver (they’re as enamored of groove as they are of hideous tales).
As Torment Prevails will be released on CD version by Memento Mori on October 23rd, and it’s recommended for fans of the ’90s works of Asphyx and Benediction, as well as the early output of Sinister and Hypocrisy. Fittingly, the album concludes with a cover of Autopsy‘s “In the Grip of Winter”.
The fantastic cover art is the work of Ryszard Wojtyński.
MORE INFO:
http://memento-mori.es
https://www.facebook.com/memento.mori.label
https://www.facebook.com/martyrdoomdeath