A cassette reissue of an older mini-album and EP tracks from these doomdeath rot-gods, Elegant Funerals For The Unknown Dead is the latest from the crushing duo of Ghoat (aka Justin Stubbs of Rituaal and Father Befouled) and Elektrokutioner (aka Wayne Sarantopoulos of Decrepitaph, Father Befouled, Howling, and Wooden Stake), rupturing more of their pestilent, lo-fi horror across the two sides of this tape.

     The first side features the Elegant Funerals For The Unknown Dead EP that originally appeared as a limited edition 12" on French label Debemur Morti. Five tracks of glacial death metal draped in rotted funerary cerements and steeped in the pungent, sickly-sweet stench of advanced decay, starting off with the mutated liturgical chanting and murk-shrouded slo-mo guitars of "Elegance Above Flesh"; doesn't take long before the whole band crashes in on that miasma of warped chanting, fuzz-encrusted dissonant riffage and tolling bells as the second song "Gaunt And Shallow" slithers forth, but when it does, it's like being slowly squashed underneath a mountain of black peat, those inhuman guttural gurgles reverberating over the band's droning slow-motion death metal and soundscapes of diseased, surrealistic crypt-drift, occasionally lurching into a weird sort of noxious tribal dirge or brief burst of speed. Not quite as murky and oppressive as their album material, but this stuff still reeks with the hypnotically repulsive mixture of putrefacted ambience, nauseating dissonance and suffocating doom that these guys have mastered.

     Side two starts off with the two songs off of their Seventh Temple Of Laodicean Scripture 7" from 2010, "Revulsion Of The Chalice" and "Unrepentant Indifference To The False Evangel"; both feature the cavernous, moldering sound that the duo nailed down early on, filthy bass and ophidian riffs winding through subterranean riffscapes laced with hymnlike singing and gusts of black ambient sound, and would have fit right in amongst the rest of their debut LP. And the last track is the monolithic "A.M.E.N. (Apocryphal Mausolea Embodied Nescience)", originally released on a an ultra-limited, single-sided 12" of the same name. Recorded live in 2010 at the Sacrifice The Nazarene Child Festival in Houston, Texas, this was the only time the song has been performed and recorded by the band, a thirteen-minute crawl through one of the band's filthier doomdeath moments, the low-fi soundboard-quality recording making this swarming, sludge-encrusted eruption of rot sound even uglier and noisier.