From the killer hand drawn artwork of lich-kings and demonic visages, Lovecraftian rituals and death-worship and gnarled, withered lettering that makes up their band logo on the cover, Massed In Black Shadow looks like it would contain another blast of primitive death metal, but Deathstench offer up something much more mutated on their debut album. Made up of members of the blackened doom duo Welter In Thy Blood, black ambient outfit A Taste For Decay and blackened power electronics project StemCell Research Project, Deathstench brings a cavernous industrial noise sound to this slab of cancerous black doom, a hideous and seriously heavy sound that we first heard on their split with Demonologists a while back.

The album begins with a pulverizing bass-heavy dirge of grinding pneumatic throb and monstrous roars buried in a blizzard of black static and intercepted radio transmissions, densely layered death-factory noise obscuring the filthy mechanized doom-riff lurking deep below. That leads into the morbid black ambient piece "Corpse Upon A Throne Of Worms", which for serval minutes simply reverberates with strange noises and mechanical loops and gusts of thick black fog until the band drops in with a massive slow motion doomdeath riff. That disembodied doom-riff slowly churns in the fog of electronic hiss and static and rumbling low-end synthesizers, while putrescent shrieks and monstrous demonic roars drift across the background, sounding like the intro to some ancient death metal demo being stretched apart into a monstrous, ritualistic sludge-trance. It's like some ultra blackened Sunn O))) jam recorded after a straight week of listening to nothing but low-fi death metal demos from the late 80s. The rest of Massed In Black Shadow continues in a similarly deformed and putrescent manner, the album moving from bad-dream soundscapes of fluttering static and eerie muted melody, heavy black sheets of blackened drift covering the sound of field recordings and random screams, swells of crushing bottom-heavy guitar sludge oozing out of the depths, vast ominous drones and blasts of massive amplified power-hum.

And there's more of that noise-damaged death metal buried in industrial toxic slime, as the band lurches into a kind of ultra-distorted doomdeath that is so blown out that it seems as if the sound is crumbling right through your speakers, transforming over the length of the track into a super heavy wall of crackling, smoldering black static. Eerie black metallish riffs circle like bits of charred debris in Deathstench's sulfurous murk, alongside hushed demonic whispering and creepy industrial loop-scapes that form from filthy mechanical drones and morbid buried melodies. They even blast into some lurching, angular blackened death metal on "Shrine Of Viscera", a mangled din of trippy bestial roars and awkward riffing, rumbling bass frequencies and loads of warped noise that ends up transforming into a hellish cacophony of crashing, scraping metal and distorted shrieks, clipped gitch-riddled electronics splattered across the harsh noise freak-out. On the track "Bastards of the Black Flame", they even bring in Cory from Demonologists to contribute additional layers of harsh electronic abuse.

I've been a big fan of everything else that these guys have been involved with in the past, their Black Goat label producing some of the coolest black/death/noise hybrids that I've come across, but man, Deathstench is easily the heaviest stuff that this crew has puked out. Heavy as hell, malevolent and utterly carcinogenic blackened industrial sludge that at times sounds as if you are listening to an older Incantation album like Mortal Throne Of Nazarene or Golgotha being remixed by Swedish death industrialist Trepaneringsritualen. Can't recommend this one enough to fans of ultra-heavy blackened industrial/doom/horror in the vein of Gnaw Their Tongues, Hypsiphrone, Sewer Goddess, and Steel Hook Prostheses. Comes in digipack packaging.