Ashen Tomb consists of Ilkka Laaksonen (vocals), Roni Oksanen and Joonatan Mäkinen (guitars), Karhu Kuru (bassist) and Valtteri Viro (drums). The band wastes no time unleashing brutality from the hyper-blast beats to the guttural growls in the opening track “Body Bag”.

The straightforwardness is one of the aspects of the album the riffs provide the same level of intensity delivered to the insane aggression, and this is to say that the horrifying growls remind me of Craig Pillard (Disma).

You can hardly find any poor moments because the ongoing rampant is overwhelming in the next song “Catharsis Through Torture” which starts with clinical blast beats, the performance is overall tight and the riffing hooks you in with the brutal combinations of the vocal effects and the galloping drum beats that launches a full-scale onslaught from start to finish.

Ashen Tomb’s songwriting and performance give us a great example of energetic craftsmanship; the Finnish death metal bands are known for their merciless and uncompromising savagery, and the band has succeeded in drawing massive old-school elements. Ferocity and brutality are emphasized throughout the album and the lead guitars are heavily present in adding depth and grooves, creating a denser sound.

The eponymous track “Ecstatic Death Reign” emphasizes speed with chugging riffs and powerful drum fills being the most incredible artillery of the Finnish quintet that grasp a firm chemistry in bringing the traditional old school sound with cavernous death doom-styled vocals.

The guitars find the right approach to burst between the slower paces and filthy death metal grooves with fiery rhythms, allowing the lead guitars to create hooks. While the song develops at a slower pace in the mid-tempo section; the riffing consistently breaking into a crushing ferocity, the closing moments of this track feature some dark keyboards that caught me off guard.

The same formula is applied in the song “Anamorphosis” when the eerie thick growls flow like a plague through the composition and the drums maintain heavy and bestial extremity. In my opinion, I would have preferred if the keyboards were used more often this would create a darker sound with the cavernous growls, relatively the tempo changes are fast then rapid shifts to blast beats.

The riffing in the album perfectly suits the brutal death metal sound; another surprising aspect is that the songs have great compositions from the brilliant ideas and the riffing prowess we get some slower and doom-like moments.

The highlight song in the album is “Ancient Tombs Sealed with Dead Tongues to Preserve the Hidden One Slumbering in the Bowels of the Earth (Mummified in Cavernous Darkness” is a mouthful of a title track that begins with a dark guitar intro. The atmosphere engulfs you as if there is something morbidly ghoulish crawling towards you, and many times the old-school Swedish vibe of Entombed is omnipresent I can say that Ashen Tomb presents something familiar, and be it the grooves, brutal sections, or the death-doom style of Incantation and Disma.

There is a lot of progression and top-notch guitar arrangements that show intricacies from the drumming and guitars, in other songs like “Cave of Staring Eyes” and “Heartworming” offer plenty of crushing and mid-paces when the dark guitar hooks and rhythm sections bring in some dark and slower passages that are similar to Nile.

The foreboding intro in the latter track is just as slow and dark as the previous one, the riffs maintain the same formula and atmosphere adding a sense of slow and morbid melodies providing some variety to the music.

Grunts and guttural growls make most of the music along the hammering drums, blast beats, and heavily aggressive riffs in the closing song “In Death, A Whisper”. This is a brutal statement from the Finnish quintet who has crafted a bold death metal record.

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