The entire discography of Disembowelment was released as a double disc set on Relapse several years ago, which we've just gotten back in stock alongside the new limited-edition double Lp release of the Transcendence... album.

If Transcendence never happened, there'd be an entire section of my music collection that would just vanish into thin air. This 1993 album from Australia's Disembowelment explored the extremes of death-doom further than anyone else at that time, and like Celtic Frost were heavy experimentalists with what metal could sound like, creating pioneering new forms on this album that would pave the way for legions of extreme doom metal bands in the decades to follow. But to this day, though. Disembowelment remains one of the most unique and unconventional bands to come out of the late 80s death metal underground, with a bizarre sound that drew from both primal death metal and ambient music, a modern visual aesthetic, and a poetic quality to their lyrics (which were better written and more imaginative than almost any other death metal band back then).

Sort of funny, though, how it's only the slow-motion stuff that bands seem to emulate from Disembowelment, as Transcendence begins with the pure cavernous death metal of "The Tree of Life and Death", a sprawling 10+ minute epic that blasts you with a strange, angular death-assault for several minutes before the band finally drops into their trademark glacial slog. But when they do, whew...this punishing heaviness slowly bears down on the listener like a wave of concrete, that massive chugging riff crawling like a black slug through the reverb-cloud of Disembowelment's crypt-like atmosphere. The reason that this album still sounds as extreme and edgy as it does twenty years later is that Disembowelment's music was genuinely weird, moving through strange percussive breakdowns and super-minimal chug-a-thons, the riffs often contorting into bizarre angular forms, and weird atonal chords drifting off clean electric guitars and clanging in the background. These guys created an alien metal sound that no-one has ever quite matched. It's a perfect mix of avant-garde experimentation, psychedelic ambience, and primitive guttural death metal that just happens to frequently slow down to a speed similar to that of the earth's crust shifting.

And then there's songs like "Your Prophetic Throne of Ivory", where chant-like singing and almost gothic guitars weave in and out of lurching deathsludge and strange, vaguely jazzy chords, emerging into passages of cold subterranean beauty across the second half of the song. There's pure grindcore filth found on "Excoriate", shifting from a lopsided blast attack and jagged riffing into one of the heaviest, most flattening tempo-shifts on the goddamn album; when this song hits the 1:02 mark, it feels like all of the air in my lungs has suddenly been sucked out. Then follows the ethereal gloom of "Nightside of Eden" where the band utilizes the breathy voice of guest vocalist Ida, crafting a Dead Can Dance-ish vibe before tumbling over into the crushing black hole of "A Burial at Ornans", nearly fifteen minutes of abject suffering set to a devastating death metal riff seemingly sculpted out of frozen tar. The "gothic" guitar sound re-emerges on "The Spirits of the Tall Hills", winding around the ponderous low-end crush, transforming into incredibly eerie ambience as the sludgy guitars, monstrous gasping vocals and chiming notes float above sheets of reverb and an onslaught of precisely executed blastbeats.

The album closes with one of Disembowelment's most arresting songs, "Cerulean Transience of All My Imagined Shores", a masterpiece of majestic chthonic death metal, bejeweled with haunting melodies cloaked in reverb and a skull-caving assault of controlled double bass drumming and grinding riffage that constantly changes shape over its ten minute duration, transforming into ever more dreadful shapes, plunging deeper into blackness as it proceeds.

The second disc in the set begins with the tracks from the 1992 Dusk Ep that preceded the debut album on Relapse; all three of the songs from the Ep would later re-appear on Transcendence Into The Peripheral, but in different forms. These earlier versions have less of that strange ethereal quality and avant garde edginess that would distinguish the full-length, and were more rooted in the band's buzzing death metal sound. Still plenty fucking crushing, though. They've also included the band's earliest releases, starting with the song "Extracted Nails" from the Pantalgia compilation, a grueling piece of barbaric death metal sloth, and the five tracks from the Mourning September demo the band released in 1990. A dreamy, Tangerine Dream-esque intro leads into the demo's crude four-track deathsludge and grindcore, putrescent and chaotic death metal in primitive form, giving us a look at the band's sound as it existed in embryonic form, climaxing in a short but utterly gorgeous outro of dark ambience and lush plainchant.

Essential.