Grave Miasma – Abyss of Wrathful Deities

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GRAVE MIASMA is a black/death metal band that started in 2006 and hails from the United Kingdom. This is their second full-length album “Abyss of Wrathful Deities” released through Dark Descent Records on May 14^th 2021. The opener “Guardians of Death” has its fair of share of HATE ETERNAL-styled guitars at times and then blasts into another warp zone of old school death metal akin to the early days of POSSESSED and DEATH. You can make quite a few parallels to the now classic album “Scream Bloody Gore” with a modern approach, the guitar sound is fairly close to that masterpiece and the vocals of Y are somewhere in between ENTOMBED and DISSECTION. There is a perfect mix of more complex riffs, blast beats, and slower/moodier black metal riffs along side their death metal counterparts.

“Rogyapa” brought me into my death metal year of 2003 as I feel there is a DIVINE EMPIRE feel to this number, with a tinge of BEHEMOTH. The overall guitar tone is much lower than in the first song. What is intriguing is how the middle eastern meets chaos atmosphere is used at times and how the fast-picking style is merged into that seamlessly. One of my favorites by far is “Erudite Decomposition” that has an OBITUARY edge to it, certainly influenced by their groundbreaking album “Slowly We Rot”. The song in terms of pace is a lot closer to that epic and shares some of its gruesome qualities, not only in the production, but in how some effects are put on the vocals to make them sound deeper and sinister.

They go down a completely different path with the epic black metal-fused number “Demons of the Sand” arguably the darkest and most lugubrious track on the entire record. I have made this comparison before, but these types of songs would be the perfect companion to horror movies. If there was a scene where someone gets murdered in a dark forest, this would need to be picked immediately as its main course. As my need and love for doom metal has still not been extinguished, I absolutely the post-metal stylings of “Kingdoms Beyond Kailash” which shares the same evil distinctions as other songs, but its slower tempo shows a different side to the band’s compositions and knows exactly when to speed up, without going into a full-blown aggression.

Ironically, I had never of the band prior to this review and had only seen their name seldom on other review websites. These 3 musicians are masters of their craft and have taken their inspiration from the 1990s golden age of death metal, the early days of melodic black metal and have blended those styles together making their own potion of cavernous, blackened death metal. The album is worth a listen (or more) to fans of this hybrid style of metal.

Songwriting: 8
Originality: 8
Memorability: 8
Production: 8