��� Man, if you though that the previous Encoffination albums were murky, wait till you hear this. While their previous two albums on Selfmadegod dived about as deep into the depths of doomdeath putrescence as you can get, the band's third full-length III � Hear Me, O� Death sees the band's sound (a calculated mix of stately funeral doom-inspired dirge and the doom-laden death metal of Onward to Golgotha-era Incantation) decomposing into something even more grotesque and abrasive, spilling out across the album's hour-long run time like a pile of rotting viscera.

���The duo of Ghoat and Elektrokutioner (who also spend time in underground death/doom outfits Decrepitaph, Father Befouled, Rituaal, and a horde of other projects) seem to have gone for more of a rumbling, low-fi recording aesthetic this time around, and their creeping slow-motion death metal, which has always crawled somewhere around the nexus of Incantation's classic early 90s output and the glacial, heavily atmospheric heaviness of Australia's Disembowelment, here shambles into even filthier, more atonal forms. It's almost "ambient", at times sort of comparable to how Grave Upheaval transform their churning, ultra-murky death metal into vast abstract blastscapes, but Encoffination's music is much more abrasive and anguished, with III's eight songs slowing down to an almost nauseatingly abject crawl.

��� After opening the album with one of the band's trademark death-ambient introductions, the sound of tolling church bells and voices rising in a ghastly hymn quickly gives way to the oppressive graveyard slime of "Charnel Bowels of a Putrescent Earth"; rumbling de-tuned guitars soften and break apart into layers of swarming rot, dissonant doom riffs become stretched and masticated into murky drones, while weird chanting voices lurk in the shadows like the murmurs of some twisted death-cult, and Ghoat's ghoulish gasp drifts like swamp gas over the soiled, deformed music.

��� The fetid atmosphere of this album makes for one unsettling listening experience; the guitars are dissonant and deformed, Ghoat's riffs frequently slipping into a gut-churning atonality that's much more pronounced here compared to previous releases, the guitars layered like mouldering cerements over the shambling , misshapen momentum of the drums, at some points the discordance becoming so intense that it borders on the Gorgutsian. Some songs swell with spectral synthesizer and spacey effects, like the cosmic funerary crawl that opens up "Crowned Icons", smears of chilling kosmische psychedelia pushing through the band's bloated slo-mo crush, and throughout the disc the duo intersperse bits of desolate ambiance, mutant choral voices, and those putrid droning organs. Absolutely filthy, mesmeric death-worship, the mephitic atmosphere threatening to choke the air from every corner of this album, pushing this even further from the realm of riffs and musicality into a kind of putrefied ambiance, the sound softening and rotting away, melting down into an oily sonic soup. Listeners looking for something more structured and riff-based might well find Encoffination's latest too droning and inchoate, but I can't stop immersing myself in this album's blackly rapturous aura and adipocere-stained emanations.