Void Rot – Descending Pillars

22/09/2020

Everlasting Spew has a great ear for doom bands that roam the extra-dimensional plane first invoked by the likes of Disembowelment way back in the early nineties. I’m referring to bands like Assumption or the subject of this review Void Rot, a talented new band from Minneapolis. They combine an old school feeling of death metal, of a time when the style did not focus so much on breaking the speed barrier, with the fathomless despair of funeral doom.

Their songs create a cosmic sense of nothingness. This great void, however, is not a sterile vacuum, but a foul place, a black hole where nothing can escape and thus remains there, forever rotting. ‘Descending Pillars’ is Void Rot‘s debut album after their ‘Consumed by Oblivion’ EP and the split with the equally nefarious Atavisma.

In true doom fashion, the record starts off with the lumbering title track which is incidentally also the longest one on display, spanning well over eight and a half minutes. It is a slow burning mammoth that is an excellent example of their despondent style without giving away everything from the get go.

It is followed up by the frenetic ‘Upheaval’ which races up to light speed in its short three minute life. The menacing rumble of ‘Liminal forms’ brings the doom back from the beyond until it breaks away in a maddening frenzy.
The funereal tones of ‘Delusions of Flesh’ would invoke the envy of even Evoken. As the drums pick up pace , the guitars stay slumberingly catatonic, ripping the very molecules of the song apart in the most splendid manner. ‘Inversion’ turns it around as it lashes out in old school fervor. ‘The Weight of a Thousand Suns’ is a short instrumental interlude. An approach to the monolith that will follow. ‘Monolith (Descending Pillars Pt. II)’ is the mirror image of the title track as it closes the portal to the void.