Review Summary: Grounds will break, jaws will drop.
Sometimes, really old memories we have in mind seem so far back in the past, with so much change in between, that it feels like they were part of the life of someone else. That bizarre sense is what one gets when facing
Tomb Mold’s latest opus
The Enduring Spirit, thinking that this band actually started just some years ago with an album like
Primordial Malignity. While their debut’s gas fuelled straightforwardness and aggression was greatly appreciated, steady steps towards massive transformation into a much more multilayered and forward thinking entity have been taken since then. Not only have we
Tomb Mold’s most ambitious album to date, but also it could daringly be the peak of their short but incredible discography so far.
To merely infer that the band has evolved since 2019’s bombastic, sci-fi packed
Planetary Clairvoyance, is an understatement. After three albums in three consecutive years, a break was taken as the musicians focused on other projects and took their time for the next
Tomb Mold full release, which was neatly teased with the excellent and unexpected demo
Aperture of Body, last year. That demo serves perfectly as an appetizer to what has now taken form as
The Enduring Spirit, an astounding work of immense presence and tremendous caliber.
Tomb Mold have unlocked an everflowing stream of properly sized progressive elements into their music, without breaking their compass or diverging too much from the characteristic sound of the band. The record blatantly offers endless fantastic riffing, complex templates of adventurous songwriting undulating between groovy brutality and technical playing that flirts with uncommon signatures, all welded with the profound deep growling and impeccable drum work of the singer / drummer Max Klebanoff. Without comparing anything between the two,
Tomb Mold’s trajectory hints a temperament that reminds the one of forefathers
Death, when the legendary band took its music to completely new realms in the 90’s.
Influences from a wide palette of known and lesser known death metal gems can be identified in
The Enduring Spirit. Flavours ranging from melodic death metal like
Dark Tranquility, short bursting tech death guitar lines that could bring
Necrophagist to mind, but even more prominently the
Cynic driven mentality of the clean guitars in “Will of Whispers”, which might be the first moment of shock and awe from such a section coming from
Tomb Mold. The listener’s brain will immediately be tickled further with the follow-up monster piece “Fate’s Tangled Thread”, which proudly conveys the spirit of the first two
Atrocity albums, and it is generally clearer now how the musical approach taken on the side project
Dream Unending, is making its way into the
Tomb Mold framework, especially in the spectacular eleven-minute closer “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity”, which is a hell of a ride to go through.
Tomb Mold, while going vividly into compositional extravagance, don’t lose their own grip on heaviness, which is expressed adequately in
The Unending Spirit but especially in the first two tracks, “The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)” and “Angelic Fabrications”. Last but not least, there's thrilling solos everywhere in the album, with the middle to ending part of "Servants of Possibility" particularly standing out.
There’s ample evidence to conclude that we have something really special here. The band’s early days paid homage to the late 80’s unadulterated extreme metal sound, which expanded and built serious momentum for them in
Manor of Infinite Norms. With
Planetary Clairvoyance, the foundations of something extraordinary were first put to place, to erect the monument that is
The Enduring Spirit. There are few cases of bands with a meteoric rise and this is one of them,
Tomb Mold have managed not only to top their previous top-notch record, but possibly to achieve heights that none of us considered before. One for the ages, as the next era of death metal belongs to names like this.
