The first 10 minutes of Tomb Mold's triumph The Eternal Spirit make it clear why they are one of the most beloved death metal bands of the last decade. The Toronto trio emerged in 2015 on the same death metal wave that launched old-school revivalists Gatecreeper and space travelers Blood Incantation, and their sound fell somewhere in the middle: just brutal enough to satisfy her brain's baser urges. death-metal lizard , but with an intoxicating virtuosity that gestured to the universe. They've also been prolific, releasing three records in three consecutive years, culminating in 2019's stellar Planetary Insight. Over the years, the band has mostly been on ice, so it's exciting to step into the game The Eternal Spirit and to hear them roar back to life, showcasing the same jumbled riffs, nimble drums and inhuman growls that they perfected on their first three records.
As great as “The Perfect Memory (Phantasm of Aura)” and “Angelic Fabrications” are, these first two tracks serve as a strange misunderstanding. The third track, “Will of Whispers,” opens with a drum from drummer/vocalist Max Klebanoff and then drops into a soft, open-hearted chord, playing over a hushed vocal from Klebanoff that sounds more like yoga. om from his typical growl. For the next 40 seconds, guitarists Derrick Vella and Payson Power trade jittery jazz and clean, reverberating progressions while Vella's free-flowing bass roams the open spaces. Only after this sunny reverie comes the heavy riff, carrying the song through a mind-blowing fantasy of muscular death metal and dreamlike atmosphere. For the rest of the album, Tomb Mold play fast and loose with the boundaries between death metal and their myriad other interests – jazz fusion, '70s prog, 4AD-style dream-pop. But most importantly, they never sound bored with death metal. No matter how far their explorations take them, they remain enthralled by the amazing possibilities of the genre.
There are precursors to their approach. Death, by many measures the first death metal band, quickly worked their way out of its maligned thrash Scream Bloody Gore to something much stranger. (With crazier vocals, Spirit label “Servants of the feature” could be a Symbolic outtake.) Atheist's mutant prog-death looms large here, and Demilich's gonzo weirdness and Incantation's cavernous doom still lurk in the corners. But the classic band most akin to Tomb Mold at this point is Cynic, whose synth and vocal sound and adherence to Zen Buddhism made them one of death metal's most glorious oddities in the early 1990s. 90. Like Cynic, Tomb Mold are seekers, fascinated by metal's transcendent potential as well as its flesh-and-blood physicality. On The Eternal Spirit, they often sound ecstatic, as if they are far from discovering the music of the spheres. Black metal trolls in Scandinavia used to drive death metal bands crazy by calling their music “life metal”. For Tomb Mold, that epithet would probably come as a compliment.
