Temple Nightside "The Hecatomb" CD Digipack

Comes in a 4-panel digipak and includes 8-page booklet (on 170gsm art paper).

After a massive debut effort, Australian black/death metallers Temple Nightside has spent the three years since not only honing their craft but also swelling in members, growing from an initial duo into a quartet now. With mainman IV the only hold-over and surrounding himself with new members in second guitarist BR, bassist V. Kusabs and drummer Mordance, this second full-length is released August 5, 2016 on Iron Bonehead Productions.
Much like their previous effort, the sound here is one of old, slumbering beasts slowly rising to overtake the world and is a perfectly apt description here. The main rhythms are based around deep, churning low-slung riff-work that effectively plods along here while employing a vast amount of sprawling, darkened patterns which create a swarming mixture of death, doom and black metal elements throughout here. The cavernous approach and churning riffing within the dark tremolo arrangements give it a more old-school blackened death metal style approach that comes off rather sinister-sounding in conjunction with the murky production job. That leaves the slower tempos to really showcase the churning patterns quite well with the churning patterns getting to take up plenty of room within the arrangements that brings out their sludgy atmospherics quite nicely here and acts as a great balance to the selected up-tempo arrangements that are featured within here. While on the whole the music works solidly in it’s vile, churning ways the fact that the album seems to get interrupted by a variety of brief, bland instrumental tracks is really where it seems to stutter somewhat. The fact that they range from barely thirty seconds to two minutes makes for some questionable nature as to their inclusion, especially when they don’t really set up the following track and two of them are back-to-back only broken up by one’s follow-up track and it halts the momentum of the middle section somewhat because of the cramped nature of these confusion efforts. Still, that’s really the only big problem on the album as the rest of it works solidly.
Though hampered by one small rather odd inclusion where it’s little instrumental interludes seem too oddly inserted into the overall running order and packed together too closely to let their effect sink in, there’s still a whole lot to really enjoy about this one that makes it a solid choice for old-school black or death metal fanatics who salivate over this type of material.

IRON BONEHEAD PRODUCTIONS is proud to present TEMPLE NIGHTSIDE's highly anticipated second album, The Hecatomb. For the last five years, mainman IV has been pursuing a bleak 'n' oblique vision of death metal. Although rooted in the vast and vibrant Australian black metal scene, the mysterious IV invested the blackest of arts into ancient Metal of Death, initially self-describing TEMPLE NIGHTSIDE as "Ritualistic Death Metal Necromancy." And indeed, that was the root - and result - of the then-duo's massive debut album, Condemnation, in 2013. But with last year's coveted split LP with comrades Vassafor - released to critical acclaimed by IRON BONEHEAD, and the lineup now expanded to a trio - the sound of TEMPLE NIGHTSIDE subtly began to morph into more atmospheric and more deeply cavernous shapes.
Alas, with TEMPLE NIGHTSIDE's lineup now a functioning a quartet, those shapes have arisen in the form of The Hecatomb. Ever so aptly titled, The Hecatomb is lumbering, lurking menace and miasmic dread dragged to the Beyond and back. It's tangibly still death metal in nature, but there's a certain sinister sensation that eludes conventionally metallic definition; its hulking plod gives way to bestial pulse and then evaporates into a smokestack-dense fog of frightening, palpable evil. The manner in which these nine tracks - three of which are concertedly dark-ambient "Commune" soundscapes - burst forth and then billow away suggest ritualistic disintegration...or more accurately, transcendence.
"A slow descent into Hell" is an oft-misused/abused appellation for sepulchral death metal, but it truly is done justice here. Abyssal sound devoted to and driven by death worship: TEMPLE NIGHTSIDE's The Hecatomb shall stand as a new golden pillar of fathomless morbidity.

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