Wow, we haven't heard an album of death metal this primitive and ghastly from Relapse in years. This crushing dose of ultra-heavy goat worship is Father Befouled's first album for their new label, following a couple of releases on Gasmask Productions, Nuclear War Now and Enucleation, and it's more of the sludgy, doom-laden Incantation worship that this band has perfected since forming in 2008. They've also listed Immolation and Morbid Angel among their influences, but it's the dissonant, doomed death metal of the mighty Incantation that FB have primarily drawn from for their brand of crawling, blasting evil. Luckily, they also channel the strangeness and otherworldly atonality that makes Incantation so great, so instead of just coming off as a retro tribute band, Father Befouled claim the sound for themselves, dragging the evil Christ-hating vibe of Onward To Golgotha through even murkier abysses of low end filth, even slowing their pulse to almost Corrupted-like levels of heart stopping slowness on Morbid Destitution Of Covenant.

The intro instantly hooks us: an ominous blast of trumpets and strings booming out of the depths, a bloodcurdling surge of orchestral doom that breaks into sinister pipe organ, setting the dreadful, lightless atmosphere as they launch into the cavernous death metal. Guttural gaseous vokills are croaked over the warped, droning death metal, riffs looping around, a heavy repetitive attack hammering the sludgy, intricate down tuned riffs into your skull, lashing out with squealing harmonics and blasting chaos. The songs are long and mazelike, and the sepulchral production is perfectly suited to this album, giving the music a cavernous, oppressive feel without taking anything away from the heaviness. As big fans of this particular breed of old fashioned death metal, we think this album crushes, and we're especially into the skilled manner in which Father Befouled constantly shifts between ultra slow grueling doom to galloping fast paced death metal to ghoulish sparse ambience to blasting chaotic fury, with songs like "Idol Defamation", "As Reverence Descends" and "His Divine Pestilence" drifting into crawling blackened doom that sucks the air right out of the room. The album ends with a creeping, abstract bit of blackened ambience that we think is pretty cool, too; the six minute "Now Desecrated" blends distant chanting monk voices, swells of dark synth drift, deep subterranean rumble, stretched out organ tones, and minimal percussion into a black liturgical ambience. So ok, Morbid Destitution might not transcend it's influences, but Father Befouled sure do a stellar job at invoking the same brand of evil, atonal sonic horror as the masters that they study from.