����� Now available on limited edition professionally-manufactured cassette from Parasitic, and back in stock on CD, this second blast of fetid tomb-slime from ambient doomdeath duo Encoffination, 2011's O' Hell, Shine in Thy Whited Sepulchres is still as recommended to fans of weird, rumbling slow-motion rot-metal as when it first came out.

����� From early on, the duo of Elektrokutioner and Ghoat (who are also both members of Father Befouled and a multitude of other death metal outfits) carved out a uniquely disgusting sound with Encoffination that has become even more singular with each release. Abandoning the inane violent imagery that plagues so much death metal for something more suggestive and smothering, Encoffination approach the concept of death and decay in an almost reverential way, apparent from the classically creepy album art to the evocative rot-worship poetry of the lyrics and their references to funerary practices and morgue science. But it really comes to putrid, shambling life with the music on O' Hell, once the music kicks in. This eight-song album reached new depths of suffocating mausoleum atmosphere, opening the disc with one of their signature sinister soundscapes "Sacrum Profanum Processionali", unfolding with the sound of tolling

deid bells (a kind of traditional English funeral bell) and crackling static overlaid with warm, warbling organ tones and fragments of morbid Biblical verse. And then "Rites Of Ceremonial Embalm'ment" crashes in, a monstrous blackened dirge powered by torturously slow drumming, massive tom strikes rumbling beneath the sickening dissonant guitars and ghastly guttural vocals, and you're suddenly flattened beneath the weight of their sound.

����� This stuff is just as nightmarish as their previous album, but it feels even more decayed and crumbling than ever, the glacial death metal stretched and frayed, the music sometimes halting or breaking apart into stretches of droning feedback and disembodied doom-laden riffage, foul sepulchral ambience fuming up from between the slabs of deformed, meandering metal. The rest of this all has that same feel, a mephitic take on classic Incantation that has been eaten through by corroding forces, leaving ragged holes and exposed ligaments in the band's creeping slime-crush.

����� As much as I dug their first album, this is where Encoffination really got to me. The mixture of shambling doomdeath and weird riff structures, the absolutely disgusting corpse-exhalations of the "vocals", the use of droning, funereal organ throughout the album, the moldering, surreal tape loops and mottled ambient passages and monstrous chanting vocals that ooze over the sound of those pounding, almost tribal drums - it's all killer stuff. Not quite as fucked-up and brain-flattening as the likes of Grave Upheaval, but damn close, definitely in that similar sickoid realm of corrupted, aurally fucked death metal horror.