Hailing from Italy and featuring members of such various underground icons as Chelmno and Tenebrae in Perpetuum, two-man band Gorrch have only been around for a decade or so yet here already present their second full-length album with a style and sound profoundly their own. You can hear influences from the usual likes of Deathspell Omega and other dissonant touchstones, yet Stillamentum shows off the band's cavernous style of black metal in a way that can't help but draw the listener in. Something like falling eternally into a deep, dark void, Stillamentum is all high-pitched riffing and deep snarls, fast and technical percussion backing a descent into madness like few others in the scene. If there's an immediate drawback, it's that Gorrch show you all their skills at once and then repeat themselves across the album, so that even past initial listens Stillamentum feels very samey...

What saves this is just how good the band are at constructing soundscapes, throwing in touches like deep choral vocals behind the walls of sound to add a hypnotic, almost dark hymn-like feel to their music, and shifting riffs here and there just enough to keep things interesting. The differences between opener Nimbus and the following slightly faster and angrier Vorago are there, for instance, despite the riffing style itself being largely similar. There's a little more melancholy to the choral vocals, for one, and the drum patterns are more complex and varied; it is genuinely difficult to discern via ear whether they are programmed or no thanks to the sheer shifts in tempo and violence, buried a little beneath the jangling riffs - they more than fit the music whichever is true!

Elsewhere, fans of Portal will appreciate the shifting, almost ambient way that the brutality of Larvae hits the listeners' ears, that crawling, violent chaos perfectly depicted on the wormy album cover. It certainly won't be to all tastes; it is entirely possible to find this a little droning and dull as a whole, yet to these ears the likes of Cryptae work perfectly as a distillation of black metal violence pushed to the limits. If there is one weak track it's Angor, which feels a little too much like a repetition of what the rest of the album has already done well at that point - fortunately, finale Phlegma breaks through the jangling intensity to provide a more epic and grandiose take on the style with militaristic drums, showing a way that Gorrch can develop their sound further. Again, not for everyone but those necronauts with a taste for hypnotic voyages beyond may well find this void worth falling into!