I've said it a hundred times before, but Dark Descent is a very frustrating label for me because they've done a tremendous amount of good for the underground scene and brought many a great band to prominence, but an overwhelming majority of their roster carries a very similar sound (that I semi-pejoratively refer to as "DDRcore") that just bores me. It's the bands like Lvcifyre, Desolate Shrine, and Father Befouled that get to me, the ones that exemplify the label's signature sound, which can be reductively explained as simply "chaotic death metal". And hey, I like chaotic death metal, but it seems to be a depressingly common thing with these bands that they load each album down with a million riffs with only a handful of them actually being any good. The reason I keep tabs on the label and why I was so happy to start getting promos from them is because they don't always stick to that formula, and the general rule I've noticed is that the further from those types of bands they stray, the better each release is. The stuff they've released from bands like Tyranny, House of Atreus, Craven Idol, and especially the subject of today's review, Crypt Sermon, range from excellent to incredible. Crypt Sermon in particular really stands out for eschewing death metal entirely and focusing purely on sweeping, epic doom metal.
In hindsight, their debut album, Out of the Garden, was even better than my initially high praise, and I definitely fucked up by snubbing it from my best of the year list in 2015. Four years later, they're finally returning with a followup, The Ruins of Fading Light, and holy shit I might like this one even more than the debut.
One thing that I think is notable about the band is that the five members have played in a combined six hundred bands throughout their careers, and yet none of them have seemed to ever touch doom metal outside of Crypt Sermon. Their histories seem to almost exclusively touch on thrash, black, and death metal bands, with various members concurrently and formerly performing in bands like Trenchrot, Horrendous, Daeva, Coffin Dust, Ashencult, Ancient Flame, something that people actually thought to name fuckin' Pizza Face, and seemingly thousands more. Hell, even the new bassist is the former bassist of fucking Vektor, a band so high speed and relentlessly technical that it's as absurd to think of him joining Crypt Sermon as it is to think of Dominic Lapointe joining Black Sabbath. Maybe the Philly scene is just super incestuous and there are only twenty guys to choose from when forming any band, I dunno. But despite all of the furious extremity of their respective backgrounds, almost none of that shines through in Crypt Sermon, and instead they craft sweeping tales in a very traditionalist epic doom sense, effortlessly channeling genre legends like Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus.
The Ruins of Fading Light is essentially just a continuation of what they were doing on the debut album with very few changes. This is still absolutely massive doom metal with a devastating bass presence, but where these guys truly excel is in their dedication to crafting instantly memorable hooks. Every single song is barbed with riffs and vocal melodies that are almost maddeningly infectious, rooting deep in your mind and refusing to let go. They never bring the tempo above a brisk gallop (though you can argue that "The Last Templar" is close enough to being "fast"), but that sort of lively skippiness is exactly the same thing that made Candlemass so good in their prime, and even then they only go that route a little under half of the time, instead seeming more content to just dig their heels in and crush you with a sledgehammer. More or less every song conveys the same idea, which you'd think would be boring for an album that runs nearly an hour long, but it's really not. Even with most tracks averaging around seven minutes long, the songs are kept interesting thanks to some wild guitar soloing, excellent riffs, and catchy vocal lines.
These vocals need to be singled out as well. While the album as a whole is consistently great and similar to their last outing, I think Brooks Wilson has had the greatest improvement in the intervening four years. The lead single, "Key of Solomon", has been met with generally positive reception, but if there are any complaints, they've been centered around Wilson's vocals, and I just can't fathom why. He has always sounded great, and I think he's even better here. His cleaner vocals are very smooth, and the lower he goes the more he sounds like Rob Lowe, which is always a good thing. I think what most people aren't jiving with though are his more hoarse vocals, which he utilizes very frequently throughout the album. Frankly, I think those are even better than his more explicit cleans. They're still clean, but they feel like the desperate scream of a man at the end of a blade. When you take into account their frequent lyrical focus on turning away from and abandoning religion (something that they tend to kinda mask with overt Christian themes and song titles, but even the basest cursory examination of their lyrics shows that they invoke this imagery with a kind of perverse blasphemy) it makes them sound even more agonizing (in a positive way). He sounds like a man who has been lied to his entire life and is expelling all of the slime he's internalized up to this point. He's awesome, don't be a dork.
Probably my only complaint is that the album is structured oddly, featuring seven full songs (like the debut) but also including three instrumental interludes, two of which are positioned right next to each other on the tracklist. This doesn't bother me too much though since everything flows together really well, to the point where the doubled up interlude frequently sneaks by as just one to my ears. I'm struggling to think of what to say in terms of album highlights. Not because there aren't any, but because they all deserve to be singled out. "Key of Solomon" is actually the worst song on the album, and that's with the knowledge that "worst" in this sense is still at least on par with the median level of greatness on Out of the Garden, so the one track most of you have heard at this point isn't even close to the best this album has to offer, if you can believe that. "The Last Templar" hits like a truck and earns its spot as the shortest song by also being the most consistently aggressive, "The Snake Handler" is a twisting epic that also finds a way to have like half of all the best riffs on the album, and the title track is an emotional catharsis steeped in downtrodden hopelessness. But really, I'd be lying if I said the best track was anything other than "Christ is Dead", which distills every single thing I love about this band (and genre as a whole) into six concise minutes that seem to fly by in under two. All of the emotion, the grandeur, the pounding riffage, the searing leads, everything is thrown into this one and given the most passionate performance these guys could possibly muster. The real highlight is the chorus, which has been stuck in my head for weeks now. Everything I said about Brooks up there was with this chorus in mind. This is the sound of a man who has finally seen the truth of the world, and equal parts broken and furious, he shouts from the highest steeple, "We are lost and Christ is dead". If every song was as good as this one, I would seriously put this in the running for album of the god damned decade.
While the rest of the album doesn't quite reach that peak, it does get damn close several times. There's basically nothing I don't like about The Ruins of Fading Light, and I think this will be in serious contention for Album of the Year as of right now. 2019 is shaping up to be an awesome year, and one of the few in recent memory where death metal hasn't completely dominated my personal favorites. Cleaner, more traditional styles like the epic doom of Crypt Sermon has been devastating this year.
RATING: 96%
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