Review Summary: Don't be scared....nothing can hurt you in the maze.
Death metal is a beautiful genre of music. That may sound like a weird thing to say about a genre that is all about death, decay and your flesh rotting off of your bones, but its damn true. There's always tons of great new bands coming out with skull crushing riffs that hit you like a strike of lightning out of the sky. Civerous is a band from California formed in 2019 and their second album,
Maze Envy, reveals a band that is ready to be put in the death metal spotlight.
The album title is perfect and the album art is an accurate display of what the music actually sounds like. It is a "maze" in the fact that you never quite know which direction this album is going to take. You obviously have your more traditional down and dirty death metal riffage that blasts you like a newly risen corpse from a mausoleum, but there's an equal amount of face ***ing black metal chaos and grueling and plodding sludgey doom passages that give the listener plenty of variety. The effortless transitions between these genres makes for some of the most engaging and emotionally draining metal that you can't help but be whisked away into the maze (see what I did there) of dizzying riffs and indignant snarls that sound like they're spewing straight from the dark lord's rotten vocal chords.
The production on this album should seal the deal for any fans of death metal. None of that overproduced techy nonsense going on with
Maze Envy. Its almost a lo-fi(ish) psychedelic mind *** in a way. The flurry of riffs are thick and chunky, the perfect compliment to the way the vocals weave in and out of the storm demonically and sounding as if they're coming out of some type of sickening black vortex.
Overall there's not much to complain about here. Nobody can bitch and moan about this being another one-note death metal band. Civerous push the boundaries of what death metal is and can be. They're not working with the most original genres in the world and yet they make this sound completely their own on
Maze Envy and give the listener a glimpse inside their sick minds. The best is yet to come for these twisted bastards and I am all aboard the hype train. I hope you all will join me on the other side of the maze.
