The bass is experienced not within the ear but in the back of your throat, and it takes a hearty cough indeed to dislodge the feeling once you’re through with the album. The drums sound as if only recorded by overhead mics, with crackling cymbals and popping toms at the fore and snare and kick trailing somewhere deep below. The pace of this album is far slower than Blight Upon Martyred Sentience or what have you, and though the murk is turned down from eleven to nine, the record lives off of atmosphere and best rewards patience. As with other caverncore releases, Untitled takes pride in production idiosyncracies which hearken back to the good old days when people knew fuck all about how to record and mix death metal but had to do it anyway. If you find Impetuous Ritual in the least bit tedious, Grave Upheaval aren’t your thing. ![]() Atonal, scrambling guitar solos pair well with that main dish (though this album only has one), as do indecipherable vocals. Combine the two and the resulting colossus is unstoppable - with the advantage of not being something you’d want to stop anyway. There’s something timeless about tremolo picking at eight times the tempo of your drummer, just as there’s a certain joy in hearing drawn-out power chords played through an amp cabinet rapidly delaminating its own plywood. But there’s also truth to the sound itself the murkiness and obscurity just really do it for some people, and after successful runs at the style by Portal and Chthe’ilist grabbing my attention in the past few years 1, I count myself among those who say caverncore but still seek out the stuff. Some will say it’s just the result of basement-produced one-man black metal acts of the past switching genres since black metal is cool now, and there may be truth to that. Call them kvlt, call them private the result is the second Grave Upheaval album once again untitled and once again filled with indecipherable moaning, squealing terrors and suffocating doom-death. There are some, or rather, many, who shun this style of hyper-kvlt doom death (known as “cavernous death metal” to men who have worn cloaks in public and “caverncore” to anyone else), but I am not one of them. ![]() This could be because Portal, Impetuous Ritual, and Grave Upheaval are the cast of a half-dozen shadowy musicians. Much like their country men country people fellow Austral beings in Portal, the only thing Grave Upheaval cherish more than cavernous production is their own obscurity.
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