Serpentine Path

Serpentine Path have an impeccable doom metal pedigree, featuring various members of Unearthly Trance, Winter, as well as Tim Bagshawe (ex-Electric Wizard and currently Ramesses). While this, their debut album, bears obvious hallmarks of those groups, it also distances itself from them. This is less stoner-ish than Electric Wizard or Ramesses, and generally less abstract than Unearthly Trance. Instead, it takes several big steps towards death metal, resulting in an impressive record that retains those bands’ crawling tempos but drags in the kind of growling riff shapes that you might find on an Incantation or Disma release.

There is some sublime down-tempo riffing to be found here. Crotalus Horridus Horridus is beautifully heavy: a deep, dank death metal riff is carried at a perfectly-judged pace- slow, like treacle oozing downhill. Aphelion is similar, with its glowering guitar patterns given a paradoxical grace by the rolling, flowing tempo. At other times the album is darker and more contorted. Bats Amongst Heathens for example, flops angrily in a gnarled fashion, suggesting either the abovementioned Incantation or else Gateways…-era Morbid Angel.

Sometimes the record is more abstract. Before the Dawn of Time and to a lesser extent Compendium of Suffering are crawling processions of scuzzy chords that wouldn’t be out of place on an oppressive avant-doom album; but they also, to my ears, evoke the snail’s-pace dread of Encoffination. This kind of thing is relatively rare, though. The last word here is the scary closer, Only a Monolith Remains, which returns once more to the default mode- the band’s consistently excellent doom-death- here augmented by some grim percussive clanging to provide a suitably dread-ridden climax. Lovely.