Ossuarium - Living Tomb

Mixing together the rather familiar elements of doom and a bit of sludge into harrowing death metal on Living Tomb, Ossuarium make their debut on the well-tread ground of death/doom an at least hungry one. The album is a foreboding, ominous affair in the more damp and dimly lit side of cavernous death metal, but as homogenous as it can come off at initial listens due to the lack of super memorable motifs or grooves, there is a fair amount of compositional intricacy that flies under the radar with all that’s going in at the atmospheric level.
The band are able to make the album ebb and flow in a manner almost akin to what goes on in a lot of atmospheric black metal or progressive metal, seamlessly flowing in and out of oppressively bleak dirges and faster, more traditionally speedy death metal sections within a single song. The smoothness with which the band transition from one motif to another could indeed leave the mind of inattentive ear thinking it just heard one long trudge through deathly sludgy waters, but it’s exactly that finesse the band are able to achieve and put on display that makes Living Tomb such a promising debut.
The main weakness of the album is that it makes most of its appeal through the menacing atmosphere it conjures through the echoing growls and thick walls of low-register guitar distortion juxtaposed with more animated drumming and old-school-inspired death metal guitar leads, which is, again, well-tread ground. There is, however, some worthwhile musicianship to be experienced amid the dense, bass-y torrents of gloomy death metal instrumentation. I enjoyed the lead guitar work and the pull-off-heavy solo of “Vomiting Black Death” and the double-bass-supplemented dual guitar harmony of the subsequent “Corrosive Hallucinations”. The double-bass backing of the climbing, rapid solo on “Writhing in Emptiness” is a big part of what takes that closing section of the song to the next level. And it’s not just when they’re showing off some technical performative competence; the band do come through with some simpler, yet tactful creative choices like the less insanely distorted doom riff that closes out the final track on the album.
Living Tomb is indeed a somewhat predictable debut in one of metal’s most saturated fields, but there is more creativity and skill to appreciate beneath the dense, abrasive atmosphere than the surface suggests. And it does show a lot of potential for Ossuarium to make some more dramatic and signature waves within their ecosystem; I am eager to see where they go from here.
Swaying in a sea of despair, and I think I see a wave coming/10

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