Strange; I was all prepared to open this review by talking about how ridiculous it was that I had not yet reviewed an Execration album for this site. But I appear to have underestimated myself- I did indeed give Odes of the Occult an extremely positive writeup back in 2011. So, it isn’t my fault that the band is still not massive- it is in fact YOURS, i.e. the reader, who did not pay sufficient heed to my important advice.

Execration is a highly innovative Norwegian death metal band; if this was their debut, I would probably be comparing them closely to recent progressively inclined releases by Swedish bands like Tribulation and Morbus Chron. But in fact they have been doing this for longer, albeit less visibly- perhaps it’s fair to say that others are now heading in their direction.

Morbid Dimensions is an excellent album, filled with highly ambitious songwriting and complex, fragmented structures. Execration are experts in at least two modes, and throughout the length of the album the listener is either immersed in one of them at a time, or hurled among them liked a traumatised vole between the paws of a cat. First are the brilliantly gloomy doom-death grooves; they give off an immersive and sinister feel which could evoke anyone from Pentagram to a Fabio Frizzi score. These elements are at their best at the very beginning of the album (the rich atmospherics of opener Cosmic Mausoleum) and are also strewn liberally throughout (the rumbling Vestiges, for example).

Then, you have the over-caffeinated up-tempo death metal, which is always bursting in from strange angles to cause visceral ruptures in the structure of songs. See for example the jittery riffing of the title track, which rips like classic Scandinavian death, but with an intense instrumental flair- the drumming, in particular, with its violently exuberant fills. We also find some weirder, darker stuff going on, too. I was quite unnerved by the bendy, droning guitar patterns that clasp hold of the latter half of Tribulation Shackles. All of these ideas are hurled together, exploding in on each other, in such a way that it makes it difficult after a few listens to really get a feel for the ‘narrative arc’ of the individual songs. The effect of this is that each time you listen you are never quite sure what is going to happen next.