GraveCoven ‎"Coughing Blood" CD Digipack

Black Doom Metal featuring members of Swamp Witch & Occlith

Blackened Doom/Death from Sacramento, California (US). - 4th record by Gravecoven, which contains demos I & II. The demos were released originally through Godz Ov War Productions, released through Transylvanian There have been no further releases since. - Complete EP.

This might seem a slightly lazy release in terms of material, since what the Coughing Blood EP does is to gather the songs already put out on the Coughing Blood and Coughing Blood 2 demos, then add (on my version, the Transylvanian Recordings one) the single cover of ‘Hades’ by Bathory. That’s a lot of coughing and a lot of blood from Gravecoven.
Their blackened extreme metal (it’s probably death/black, just not really that specific) doesn’t precisely involve coughing and blood, though I’m fully capable of imagining the physical manifestation of this music being a grim kind of violence and suffering, since the duo submit me to quite a bit of desperation, malevolence, and chaos. I’m almost tempted to say that a song like ‘Spiritual Violence’ represents more an attitude than a musical style, because the admittedly well-structured track weighs in with unintelligible screams, mouldy blasting, moments of piercing lead guitar and synth, plus crawling sections of squalor where the instruments blend together like I’ve pushed up against soft rotted bodies in the darkness. The tracks from the second demo seem a bit more musical, ‘The Ecstasy of Hatred’ smashing a weighty death metal riff out of the gate and evolving more satisfyingly over the course of more than 6 minutes, even turning vaguely to rattling Swedeath groove at one point. Of the earlier material, ‘Furious Fires’ rockets through disgruntled blastbeats into Darkthrone territory, yet I should clarify that sometimes the vocalist is just screaming shrilly (thankfully with lots of reverb), so this is about emotion as much as riffs.
The whole feel of Coughing Blood seems made to antagonize the listener and leave mental and physical scars after the experience; even so, Gravecoven cater to concerns like song length, discernible structures, and - to a lesser degree - production standards, ensuring that their music can be listened to with some degree of humanity, not only knee deep in a bog while smeared in excrement. Having the Bathory cover at the end aids that feature a great deal, seeing as the song was anyway a straightforward romp with a bit of heavy metal attitude and now gets a kick out of meaty bass, showing that this style could perhaps be fun if Gravecoven go to see the doctor about that nasty cough of theirs.

Sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...