Two no-guitars death metal bands conspire to create a crushing split album of bass-only subversion of metal music’s six-strings-centric conventions. The approach is considerably different, however. THECODONTION signals a sharp turn for their style, a renewed sound which now features a heavy usage of keyboards and Moog-like synthesizers (courtesy of Stefano Allegretti, guitarist/keyboardist of psychedelic death metal band BEDSORE), adding to their wailing reverberated lead sections, and the inclusion V.P. and L.S. now performing as stable lineup members. The result is an ethereal, atmospheric death metal sound colliding with their double bass grinding clangor. CEREMENTED instead chooses an in-your-face, stripped down death/doom metal approach with disturbing bass feedbacks and cavernous low grunts. A dripping horror voyage into primal landscapes of annihilation, alternating slower sludgy sections and faster, ultra-distorted bass riffs. A coarse sonic drape heralding the return of this US band afer their 2019 split with Malefic Levitation. THECODONTION’s side focuses on two prehistoric marine arthropods which both lived during the Cambrian period (about 520 million years ago): the Trilobite and the Hallucigenia. The former was presumably an ancestor of horseshoe crabs and it existed in oceans for almost 270 million years, surviving the Cambrian extinction all the way to the Permian. The latter was an ancestor of velvet worms and had an eccentric history of study: at first it was thought that this creature walked on its long legs but it has since then been “reversed”, its legs being defensive spines on its back instead. The third song “La Torre” is a cover of Italian singer-songwriter Franco Battiato, a massive inspiration for the band and their first foray into clean vocals usage. CEREMENTED’s side deals with destructive forces of nature and cataclysmic events that forever torn away our planet’s continuum, the metaphorical force of an extinction which wiped away most living creatures, with only few species surviving. The cover artwork has been exquisitely executed by Icelandic artist Skaðvaldur (Graveater, Urðun), an abstract depiction of prehistoric invertebrates wallowing amidst the trembling telluric depths of the Earth.
