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First released in a limited run by the band themselves, Abyssal's swirling death vortex Novit Enim Dominus Qui Sunt Eius has been reissued by Profound Lore in a limited edition digipack release with new artwork. This British outfit offers up a surrealistic, highly deformed blast of death metal that has some similar qualities as label-mates Portal, Mitochondrion, Antediluvian and Impetuous Ritual, while lacing their filthy black blast with their own unique strain of sonic weirdness. The album begins with a brief blackened dronescape that sprawls out for a minute, a vast black fog of low-end rumble and chthonic drift that begins to extend its tendrils outward, and then the band suddenly crashes in with "The Tongue Of The Demagogue", revealing their true form as a contorted blackened death metal monstrosity, composed of hypnotic droning riffs and discordant tremolo sections, the drummer careening through ever-shifting patterns of blast and dirge, the guitars straining against form as they undulate in bizarre slippery figures and are fractured into harshly discordant shapes. Right off the bat, these guys tap into a surrealistic sound that, although sounding quite different, will no doubt get them lots of comparisons to the likes of Mitochondrion, Portal and Antediluvian; there's definitely a shared hallucinatory quality to their music, and you can also hear some common DNA between Abyssal's churning atonal horror and the discordance and experimentation found in the later Blut Aus Nord albums. This is unmistakably rooted in death metal though, with inhuman guttural vocals, ultra-heavy churning chuggery and a punishing bottom-end at the heart of Abyssal's music. The other songs move through similarly suffocating terrain, darkly majestic riffs bending and melting around the scattershot arrangements and bilious black atmosphere, while a few of the shorter tracks drift into seething Lustmordian ambience and subterranean industrial horror, scattered among the longer death metal eruptions. When the trio opt to drop in to one of their monstrous grooves ("The Headless Serpent", the instrumental "Created Sick ; Commanded To Be Well"), these parts slither up from beneath the churning amorphous blastscapes to create a powerful, jarring shift in the band's churning chaos. There's also some vaguely jazzy moments that appear in the middle of "As Paupers Safeguard Magnates" and at the end of the closing track "The Last King" that give Abyssal's murky death metal an additional unique touch, and definitely makes this stand out from the rest of the Incantation-influenced crowd that has been dominating so much of underground death metal in recent times. This is one of my favorite albums to emerge from Profound Lore this year, an oppressive and hallucinatory assault that fans of the more avant-garde end of the death metal spectrum will definitely want to check out.

Limited to one thousand copies.