Abyssal - A Beacon in the Husk

With quite a knack for intriguing and perplexing death metal and little inclination to explain much about Abyssal, Gregg Cowell certainly justifies the project’s maintained mystique with the way he warps death and doom metal into such a similarly peculiar and abstractly horrifying form. This is the fourth full-length to go under the U.K.-based project’s belt, and it’s no simpler of an experience than any of Cowell’s previous efforts under this name. Yet for its all its mystical aura, A Beacon in the Husk is a relatively simple album to understand. Twisting death metal’s usual cavernous terror into something more winding and hard to follow, A Beacon in the Husk recalls the likes of Portal’s Vexovoid (a welcome similarity for me, being that that is my favorite Portal album), but substituting the longer groan of doom metal for Portal’s death-flavored technicality, resulting in an LP more than one-and-a-half times the length of the average Portal album. I bring up Portal not because Abyssal’s work is by any means distractingly indistinguishable from theirs, but because they both happen to converge on similar abstractions and enhancements of death metal’s chaos. A Beacon in the Husk’s winding guitar work, haunting subtle growls, and jagged compositional structures only remind of Vexovoid rather than shamelessly ape its style. And while I might still favor Portal more on average, for what Abyssal does differently with this left-field mutation of death metal on this album is certainly meritorious in its own right. I mentioned the more long-winded aspect of doom metal being a key ingredient in the band’s sound, which might invoke thoughts of the droning dirge that doom metal often embodies, but what Abyssal are doing with doom here is just expanding the space in which they work with their spiraling death metal madness, somewhat akin to what Primitive Man have evolved toward with their more recent releases. The occasionally unconventional guitar work and the more dragged out bellows of doom-y death metal surely give A Beacon in the Husk a uniquely ambient quality that is arguably a little less jarring than whatever intentionally disconcerting atmosphere Portal seeks to drum up. Again, I only bring up Portal because it’s nice to hear other artists with similar ambition to push death metal’s boundaries the way they do. And Abyssal are definitely helping to make the exploits of the death metal avant-garde entertaining and worth the venture into the lesser known.

Fear & spacial dysphoria/10