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TREPANERINGSRITUALEN  Deathward, To The Womb  CD   (Cold Spring)   16.98


Newly reissued on gorgeous gatefold digipak CD, and featuring the bonus track "I Remember When I Was God", an epic collaboration with Michael Idehall and members of Arktau Eos, Bölzer, Aether, and Hadewych. As for the album proper, here's our original review from 2012:

One of the latest releases from this Scandinavian master of diseased occult industrial, Deathward To The Womb originally came out on 10" vinyl from Release The Bats and has since sold out from the label; it appears that we snagged the last available copies of this fearsome death-rite.

Beginning with the incredibly thick and suffocating death-drift of "The Birth Of Babalon", Trepaneringsritualen wastes no time in unleashing its oppressive graveyard ambience, laying massive slabs of rotted noise and low-end rumble across distant, barely perceptible rhythms that feel like war-drums pounding from deep below the earth's surface, while deep, slurred vocals slowly ooze over the ghoulish soundscape, drenched in delay and black tar. It just gets creepier and more sinister as it progresses, heading into the bleak lightless depths of the title track, a monstrous death industrial dirge in the classic Cold Meat vein doused in blackness, filled with deep rumbling drones and evil guttural incantations, high wailing tones that come screeching through the void, and a slithering doom-laden bass line and distant percussive rattling and clanking that builds upon the already unnerving atmosphere of inescapable death. The side closes with a real knockout, the lurching death-dub nightmare "Osiris, Slain & Risen" that smears all sorts of hallucinatory effects over a deep, sinister bass-groove.

"She Is Flame Of Life" opens the b-side with more grim electro-throb, a pulsating distorted synthesizer drone a la Genocide Organ that worms its way through a fog of moaning demons, swells of minor-key creep, and blood-encrusted machinery slowly revving to life. A more ritualistic feel (though no less horrific in tone) permeates the steady percussive pounding and slavering jaws of "Sacrament & Crucifixion", where foul Evil Dead-like voices call out from behind a veil of rot. The closer is one of Trepaneringsritualen's most rhythmic tracks, a pounding graveyard celebration called "All Hail The Black Flame" that blends thick cloying smears of black noise with ecstatic roars of bloodlust and booming, dubbed-out tribal drums that recalls the groovier moments of MZ.412. Only this is awash in enough exhumed filth to give you strychnine poisoning.