Ritual Chamber – The Pits of Tentacled Screams

And then there was this.  Death metal anymore can really irritate us unless done right, and let’s be clear in case that implication wasn’t too your plebe mentality’s liking.  It’s often not.  It’s often trite and built on the same misogynist sliced-limb bullshit that was cool maybe thirty years ago.  No one cares about your Butchered at Birth reproduction shirt, okay?  Now it’s as redundant as a 4/4 chord in country.  To get the attention of the autocrat, you need to go next level, or dig so far down into the filth only the filthy can love you.  True listeners of death metal aren’t satisfied with the usual corpse imagery, they want people, as they drive by in their rusted cars, to wonder if there isn’t an actual corpse somewhere in there, or perhaps in the driver’s stomach.  Rotting, filthy, disgusting, that’s what it should be.  Leave all this technical crap to the potboilers at Razor Blade so they can buy a new car, we’ll stay down here, down where’s it’s crusty, and moist with blood, muddy, rotten to the marrow, and so vomit-inducing we’re proud to know that no one else, anywhere, would dare to listen to it, or in this case even look at it, because the deeper you go the more your soul changes into something else, and there’s no chance of coming back.

  

Ritual Chamber is actually a solo project of Dario Derna (known as Numinas), who’s done a ton of work with other bands (just check that link to see).  The Pits of Tentacled Screams (oh wow glorious that title) is actually the first demo of this project, released digitally in November of 2013, but recently picked up by four different labels for three different formats, including a sick, limited splatter vinyl edition.  Usually when you see that, you know it’s something especially disgusting, and if the cover hasn’t given you any indication, listening sure will.  The confusing muddle of limbs, empty faces, teeth, and the title itself is essentially what you can expect out the music.

 

That’s because The Pits of Tentacled Screams is all of the good of true modern death metal, none of the bad, or should we say rather the boring.  It comes in with no assumptions about its image, only the sound is the foundation it works with, that being harsh, degraded chords sieved through flesh to create a guttural, diffuse recording quality.  Which is how death metal should sound.  And it’s all covered in a sense of extreme melancholy.  See, death metal isn’t just about the theme of death, it needs to sound like death, particularly like something in the process of rotting or so rotted the stench sticks to the insides of your nostrils for weeks.  Numinas manages to depress at the same time that he destroys.  The rattling of the drums shakes your brain inside of its cradle, dragging the rest of you down into depths so dark pulling out a Lovecraft reference will make you sound like you don’t deserve to listen to it.  This is more ancient than an ancient God, it’s the darkness from which God tried to make light but failed.

 

Ritual Chamber Official Facebook

Written by Stanley Stepanic

Ritual Chamber: The Pit of Tentacled Screams
Duplicate Records, Hellthrasher Productions, No Posers Please!, Nuclear War Now! Productions
4.8 / 5