Prepare for DEATH! Japanese deathsludge warlords Coffins released this album back in 2005, and it's now available as a deluxe gatefold double LP from Kreation. Featuring members of Church Of Misery and Dot[.], Coffins has been picking up alot of steam recently with a bunch of new releases on the horizon, and are even coming to the US at the end of this month to do a short tour of the East Coast that will have them playing at the Maryland Death Fest, which I can't wait to bear witness to. If you haven't heard them yet, Coffins are a throwback to the sludgiest epoch of death metal, that diseased vomitsphere inhabited by slow-motion death metal monstrosities like Autopsy, Winter, Hellhammer, and Cianide. Super simplistic and primitive death metal riffing played at near glacial levels of slowness, over grueling slog beats and fronted by the ghoulish decayed vocals of Uchino
. Uchino's sickening zombie grunts are in a league of their own, and are an integral part of the rotting Japanese graveyard vibe that Coffins enshroud themselves in.

2005's Mortuary In Darkness introduced alot of 'heads to the dank filth of Coffins, and it remains one of the more crucial slabs of atavistic death metal of the decade. Gentler stomach's will be rattled by the ridiculously loathsome Gore Shriek style cartoon album artwork that was produced by legendary death metal illustrator Chris Moyen (Incantation, Archgoat, Beherit, Goatlord, Absu, Merrimack), and the first three sides lumber through eight tracks of impossibly detuned filthriffage, subsonic buzzsaw basslines, creeping funereal doom, opening with the fetid psychedelic winds of "Black End", a black cloud of reverb and feedback that swirls into noxious tentacles of high end skree for a couple of minutes, until the band finally kicks in with a creeping, crushing riff, a fusion of Corrupted and Cianide and Winter. As much as I like all of the nutso post-Gorguts/Athiest technical death metal that is out there, Coffins scratch a certain scummy death itch none of those more "evolved" artists can. Supreme heaviosity.

Kreation put this vinyl edition of Mortuary together as a double LP set, in a sweet looking gatefold sleeve, and this vinyl release also includes two bonus tracks from Coffins' Sacrifice demo that didn't appear on the original CD: "Into The Coffin" and a cover of Venom's "Warhead"! Limited to 1,000 copies, we have ours on black vinyl.