SKULL CRUSHING DEATH SLUDGE. What else were you expecting from the new album from Coffins? As much as I love it when bands experiment with their sound, Coffins are one band that I am perfectly content to hear plumb the same rotten depths with each new album. I know I'm not the only one, either. These creeps have been taking the underground death/doom scene by storm lately, and anyone that was fortunate enough to see them at the Maryland Death Fest or one of their few East Coast tour dates earlier this year bore witness to one of the heaviest live performances ever. Coffins were so massive live, their bottom end so ridiculously behemoth and the bass grinding so thick that I could literally feel Uchino's woodchipper guitar riffage rattling my molars right outta their sockets.

So here we've got the newest slab o' subsonic graveyard sludge from Coffins, Buried Death, again on 20 Buck Spin and sporting awesome old-school death metal artwork from French legend Chris Moyen, who has been responsible for Coffins' previous album covers. Like all Coffins albums, this is a celebration of fetid corpse stench, death, decay, suffering in the afterlife, and other morbid visions rendered through impossibly crushing, mostly mid-paced death metal that takes it's cues from the classic sludgery of Celtic Frost, Winter, Autopsy, early Grave, Cianide and that whole early 90's death/sludge sound. Much like their sisters in Gallhammer however, Coffins put their own distinctly "Japanese " spin on this sort of slo-mo crusty doom, draping Uchino's sickly, phlegm-puking corpsegrunts and gutteral undead moaning across the plodding death dirges, and injecting an abundance of Tom G. Warrior-brand "Ughs" that never fail to please me. "Purgatorial Madness" also has some mutant soloing going on, and also has the distinction of being one of Coffins' fastest songs with it's thrashy Dis-beat verses and burst of blastbeat action at the end, and "Altars In Gore" is almost totally mid-tempo, one of the more rockin' jams on the album. But then you've got "Mortification To Ruin" (which appeared in an earlier form on last years ass-stomping split CD with The Arm And Sword Of A BaStard God), an almost Corrupted-strength sludge monster that vomits up a diseased whammy-bar molested solo towards the end, creeping at coagulated oil-slick speed across a rotten landscape of detuned riffage and screams of horrific feedback. The album's closer "The Frozen Styx" drags across eight minutes and slams the tomb door shut with an oozing, rotten doom crawl that evokes sludge legends Grief at their most glacial. Beyond heavy!

The CD edition of Buried Death is presented in a heavy Stoughton printed gatefold jacket, with the disc enclosed in a printed slipsleeve.